Storage solutions are advancing fast enough that your argument cannot succeed. What you are saying used to be sort of plausible, but the sell by date on it passed long ago.
Right, as evidenced by the extensive storage infrastructure being deployed /s.
The US has 25 GWh of storage, as compared to an hourly electricity consumption of 500 GWh. Literally less than ten minutes of storage. Almost all of it hydroelectric, which is a big infrastructure project on par with building nuclear power plants
I'm sure you're eager to talk about how thermal storage, or concret weights with pulleys, or compressed air is going to be 100x better than current solutions. But until those things move out to prototypes and I to mass production, they represent potential solutions not actual solutions. Like fusion. If the next attempt at fusion works, great! But building out infrastructure assuming it's going to work is extremely unwise.
> Right, as evidenced by the extensive storage infrastructure being deployed /s.
Invalid argument.
> The US has 25 GWh of storage, as compared to an hourly electricity consumption of 500 GWh. Literally less than ten minutes of storage. Almost all of it hydroelectric, which is a big infrastructure project on par with building nuclear power plants
Irrelevant point.
Storage was marginal in the past because there wasn't much of a business case for it. With renewables crashing in price and fossil fuels being phased out, that is changing. There are now strong market forces pushing development of storage technologies. Your insistence of carrying over the market conditions of the past into the future leads you astray.
California has already saturated the daytime energy demand on sunny days. So does Hawaii. The market forces already exist. But people aren't building storage. Because it's not feasible, short of a decisive breakthrough in storage technology.
Maybe one of the proposed storage solutions will pan out. But building out trillions of dollars of infrastructure projects on the hope that a future breakthrough will make storage feasible is very risky. Fusion has been 10-20 years away for the past 50 years. General artificial intelligence has been 10-20 years away for the past 50 years. Between:
1. Going with a known solution, that already generates more electricity than solar and wind combined and one we have 70 years of experience working with.
2. Going with a solution contingent on a massive technological breakthrough to actually work.
When the stakes are as high as climate change, I cannot even remotely justify going with #2 over #1 even if the costs are potentially lower on paper.
And that is a recent thing there. The global market is still developing, and technologies don't materialize instantly. CO2 taxes are still low (or zero) just about everywhere.
But hey, I hope you are also not going to claim nuclear will be cheaper in the future, because I could reflect that argument right back at you. And I could observe that, unlike with renewables and storage, nuclear has a horribly bad historical experience curve.
> Maybe one of the proposed storage solutions will pan out. But building out trillions of dollars of infrastructure projects on the hope that a future breakthrough will make storage feasible is very risky.
It's only a $$$ risk. We absolutely know the storage is possible, we just haven't confirmed how cheap it will be. Worst case is we spend a bit more. This is fine. Investments are not guarantees; one is always gambling.
No, it's not "worst case we spent a bit more". Total global lithium ion battery production amounts to less than one hour of storage for the United States alone. Things like pulleys and synthetic methane remain in the prototyping stage.
By this logic why not just use fusion? It's possible. We don't know which exact approach we'll use (lasers, magnets, etc.). We don't know how cheap it'll be, but hey it'll happen eventually right? No.
It's not "worst case we spend more money". It's "worse case we never solve climate change". And that's a pretty bad worst case.
We're already at the point where markets are starting to see saturation with renewables. But this unfounded aversion to nuclear power is hampering actual progress to decarbonization. The cost of waiting around and hoping for storage to become viable is not just the cost of building those storage systems, but also the continued release of fossil fuels as we wait for that to happen - and who knows when that will happen, if ever.
No, it is "worst case we spend a bit more". We absolutely know that storage is possible. Pumped thermal electricity storage, for example, uses only well understood technologies.
We solve climate change by raising CO2 costs high enough. Again, this is not a go-no go thing, it is just haggling over the price.
> We're already at the point where markets are starting to see saturation with renewables.
This just means CO2 taxes aren't high enough. BTW, they'd have to be $300-400/ton for new nuclear to compete with gas in the US.
You or I could go out today and buy off the counter parts, build a scale model of a pulley system, and use it to store power. We could have done that a century ago.
To the best of my knowledge, fusion only demonstrated net-positive energy production this decade, and hasn't yet reached ignition in a man-made device.
The US has 25 GWh of storage, as compared to an hourly electricity consumption of 500 GWh. Literally less than ten minutes of storage. Almost all of it hydroelectric, which is a big infrastructure project on par with building nuclear power plants
I'm sure you're eager to talk about how thermal storage, or concret weights with pulleys, or compressed air is going to be 100x better than current solutions. But until those things move out to prototypes and I to mass production, they represent potential solutions not actual solutions. Like fusion. If the next attempt at fusion works, great! But building out infrastructure assuming it's going to work is extremely unwise.