How robust is the cheapest energy-storage technology at each duration when costs are uncertain?
research/energy-lcos-mc
How robust is the cheapest storage technology by duration to uncertain costs? Monte Carlo over energy-lcos: Li-ion wins 96% of scenarios at 2 h but 18% at 8 h; no technology wins over 48% between 6 and 12 h; caverns win most from 24 h. Ranges assumed. Stylised.
What it found
A Monte Carlo over the energy-lcos model: 4,000 scenarios draw each technology's energy cost, power cost and efficiency from assumed ranges, plus the discount rate (3–10%) and charging price ($10–100/MWh), and count how often each is cheapest. Lithium-ion wins 96% of scenarios at 2 hours, 64% at 4 and 18% at 8; between 6 and 12 hours no technology wins more than 48%, so the point-estimate winner is a coin toss there. Caverns win most scenarios from 24 hours (compressed air 61% at 24 h, 81% at 100 h) and hydrogen 69% at 500 hours. Charging price is the largest single swing in cost. Stylised: every range is assumed, draws are independent and uniform, and the use pattern is fixed.
A figure from its own output
Paper, code and results
More in Energy supply and dense energy storage
- Do the lithium-ion cell designs found with a fast model still win under the full porous-electrode model?Re-scoring 49 designs from energy-cell under PyBaMM's full DFN model instead of SPMe: rank correlation 0.86 at cycle 100, the SPMe winner is 3rd of 45 and still +38% over the reference cell (+31% under SPMe), DFN reports about 19 Wh/kg more on average, and SPMe fails to cycle 3 designs DFN handles (modelled, stack level)
- How hard does a least-cost zero-emission German grid cycle its storage, and does the levelised-cost map survive that use?How hard does a least-cost zero-emission German grid cycle its storage? Batteries about 1,700–1,900 h a year (near the assumed 2,000), cavern hydrogen only 719 h, which more than doubles its LCOS to $864/MWh.
- Which storage technology is cheapest at each duration once costs come from NREL ATB and PyPSA technology-data, not from round numbers?Which storage technology is cheapest at each duration once costs are sourced (NREL ATB 2024, PyPSA technology-data)? Li-ion to 4 h, cavern compressed air from 6 h; at 8 h pumped hydro 52%, air 27%, Li-ion 22% of scenarios; hydrogen's assumed 500 h win does not survive.
- How much of the cost of a zero-emission German power system is the storage assumption, once costs are sourced?What does a zero-emission German power system cost once
energy-mix's assumed costs are replaced by sourced ones? PyPSA on 2019 hourly demand with PyPSA technology-data costs (Danish Energy Agency et al.): EUR 222/MWh with a steel hydrogen tank, EUR 144 with caverns, EUR 75 unconstrained; the storage type moves the answer more than the cost year. - Which weather year sets the hydrogen store of a zero-emission German power system, and how much does the cost depend on it?Which weather year sets the hydrogen store of a zero-emission German power system? The same sourced-cost PyPSA model on 2015 to 2019: EUR 203 to 271/MWh with a steel tank, EUR 141 to 155 with caverns, and a cavern store of 24 to 36 TWh depending on the year.
- Does residual load explain German day-ahead electricity prices on a year the model never saw, and how wrong was the flat merit-order price?Does residual load explain German day-ahead prices on a year the model never saw? Yes: correlation 0.87 and RMSE 9.6 EUR/MWh on 2019 against 23.0 for the flat merit-order price; the cheap-quarter mean is within EUR 4–9/MWh; the rest is the fuel-price level.
All 39 Energy supply and dense energy storage projects →
Other research topics
Proper scoring & elicitation28Effort & peer prediction9Verification games & slashing19Detection & tolerances14Markets as routers13Prediction-market design9Paying contributors8Decentralised training systems23Digital twins & sim-to-real164LLM chip design loops40Robot manufacturing loops53Ambient AI assistant46Self-replicating manufacturing34Simulation-first design64Engineered clothing45Task-specific AI accelerators40Algorithmic chip-design loops42Open-source purpose-built robots44The software-engineering loop43Adversarial human imitation41Open-source residential construction41Autonomous multi-angle capture34Sensing, imaging and 3D31Energy supply and dense energy storage39Robot societies among people31Agentic co-design of low-cost robots27Laundry-hanging robots25Machine learning on qualitative data23Robots on the building site27Civilizations & group psychology1History & human sciences1
Produced with AI assistance (Claude). Results are from the code in this repository and are simulated or stylised unless the abstract says otherwise; nothing here implies affiliation with or endorsement by any lab, researcher or company cited. MIT licensed.