That cost sounds way better than anything lithium batteries can do for grid storage.

That's a sales price too.

' Eos will use the new money to bring that line up to what Philippe Bouchard, business development manager, described as a “megawatt-per-month production capability” over the course of the year. The startup will deliver about 1 megawatt of its DC battery systems in 2015, he said.

But “Eos’ business strategy is not to become a large global manufacturer of this technology,” he said. “There are other manufacturers better suited to that task.” To that end, the startup is in discussions with what he described as some of the “largest contracts manufacturers in the world,” in search of partners willing to replicate its production lines, and help it to reach its goal of 100 megawatts of annual capacity in 2016.'

http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/eos-raising-25m-to-build-megawatts-of-low-cost-grid-batteries

REs with storage may be the final 'clean' solution at an affordable cost.

H2/FC may be another competitive solution when combined with H2 station for VFCs?

The floor is 12¢/kWh (the EOS site does not say whether this is storage cost or includes the price of power to charge the battery).  That's pretty steep, when wholesale baseload costs are on the order of 5¢.  When you add the full RE feed-in tariff, the wholesale price is going to have to be north of 20¢, which is far too high for many users.

Nuclear produces (not just stores) power for far less.  Kewaunee was shut down because it couldn't get contracts to sell its power for even 6¢/kWh.

If anyone cares, my analysis of the cost of power on an RE/Eos grid was posted some time ago at The Ergosphere.

I think throttling the reactors is barking up the wrong tree; if they're loaded with enough fuel to run flat-out until the next scheduled fueling, it makes no sense at all to turn them down.  What we need is secondary uses either for electricity (e.g. pre-heating DHW) or heat itself.  Elsewhere I suggested pervaporation of water to generate anhydrous ethanol using tapped steam.  There are plenty of other uses for heat which could potentially be co-located with nuclear plants.

More on desal: the beauty of using excess energy (heat or electricity) for desal is that, unlike energy, water is eminently store-able, and extensive water storage infrastructure already exists in most developed countries. In the growing areas of the world with water security issues, desal is the future, and it dovetails perfectly with a grid that needs to cope with excess electricity or nuclear power plants that need to run flat out to best amortize their capital costs.

$160 per kWh rather high. May be the reason is not being mass product yet.
Pay back calculation for peak powe is complicated trick. It could inlude not only power generation but transmission and distribution cost avoidance. Usualy manafucturers do not know how utilities are calculating peak power cost. Batteries has a lot advantages due to the small scale. Power quality regulation always been the market for such products and normaly is regarded as power distribution cost.

A few cents more to support the change over from fossil and other centralized generation methods with significant risks and unresolved issues is something that I am will to pay for. The insistence in being the cheapest while we destroy our surroundings is a false argument. The consumer is often said to be unwilling to pay these cost, but in fact they are rarely given a choice. $160/kWh is pretty good. It doesn't quite destroy the industries of degradation, but it provides a starting place. I would think that roof top solar cooperatives where communities of like minded people who have roof top solar could form local micro grids at a reasonable cost.