Value chain · CLM-0198
In plain terms
The same 2010 paper gives two very different price tags, about $650 million and about $5 billion, for storing the same amount of electricity (26 gigawatt-hours, about one day's supply for a city the size of Austin, Texas). The paper does not explain why the two numbers differ.
The claim as recorded
SRC-043 states two different capital costs for the same nominal "26 Gigawatt-hours" of grid storage within the same paper: about USD 650 million on one page (computed from a stated USD 25 million/GWh pumped-hydro rate) and about USD 5 billion on a later page (given without a restated rate or citation), a roughly 7.7x discrepancy for what the text presents as the same quantity.
Scope and limits
This does not establish which of the two figures (if either) is correct, nor whether the $5bn figure is a typo (e.g. for $0.5bn) or reflects an unstated change of storage technology or assumption. It does not establish a reliable USD/GWh storage cost more generally; it only documents that this specific source is internally inconsistent on this figure, which matters because the $70bn/GW "totaling" figure (which the source uses to argue space solar is "already comparable" in cost to fully-firmed ground solar/wind) is downstream of the unreconciled $5bn number, not the $650M-$1.1bn figure derived earlier in the same paper. Both figures were read at a 4x render (SRC-043 pp.13 and 18), so neither is the register's misreading; whether "$5 Billion" is a typo for "$0.5 Billion" is a question about the source (ON-027 sweep, 2026-09-20).
What it assumes
That both passages are meant to describe the same 26 GWh quantity (the text on page 18 refers back to the same 1-GW-city, ground-solar-baseload worked example built up over pages 12-14, so this reading is well supported but not stated as an explicit cross-reference by the author).
Where it comes from
Page 13 (verified against rendered page image at 4x zoom): "This translates into an average of about $25,000 per Megawatt-hour and $25 Million per Gigawatt-hour. A storage plant that needs to store 26 Gigawatt-hours (just 1 day's power supply) would thus cost about 650 Million dollars to build (estimated range from $260 Million to $1.1 Billion dollars)." Page 18 (verified against rendered page image at 4x zoom): "This showed that such a plant would cost about $65 Billion per Gigawatt, plus the cost of a massive energy storage system ($5 Billion for 26 Gigawatt-hours storage), totaling about $70 Billion per Gigawatt." Arithmetic check: $25M/GWh x 26 GWh = $650M, matching the page-13 figure exactly; the page-18 figure of $5bn implies a rate of about $192M/GWh, roughly 7.7x the page-13 rate, with no new storage technology or basis cited for the change.
Basis: USD, nominal (no inflation adjustment stated); the page-13 figure traces to a cited 2005 US government-sponsored climate-change report's pumped-hydro storage cost range ($10-45/kWh, averaged by the author to $25 million/GWh); the page-18 figure is asserted in the same 2010 paper with no cited source or restated methodology
Related records
- Answers question
- QST-021 not published in this release
Cite this
energyaperture.com/c/clm-0198
CLM-0198, Energy Aperture, as of 2010.
Connected records
Other published records linked to this one. A list, not a judgement.