| > The GitHub estimate is only using known resources and reserves, a number which goes up every year as we discover more. It is not an estimate of total accessible lithium. Yes, it is. 5 minutes is the amount provided by known reserves. 19 minutes is what can be provided with all accessible lithium. This is known reserves, plus the amount we expect to find later. > I don't know where that number comes from on that page, but it's wrong. More than 2GWh were connected to the US grid in Q4 2020 alone: Which amounts to a whopping... 14 seconds worth of energy storage. > And even if your number were right, it doesn't address the core point that battery storage deployment is growing at an absolutely incredible pace. In cost-competitive grids, it's replacing natural gas: 17 GW of natural gas was constructed in Texas alone. In fact, not even all of Texas, just the part serviced by ERCOT. Your claim "storage is being deployed in GW comparable to new natural gas GW" is not even remotely true, and your own sources prove it. > This is just bad economics. These all affect each other. As production costs fall for lithium ion batteries, demand is growing, as shown by that RMI document. The cost of batteries is not falling because the demand is falling, the cost of lithium ion battery is primarily determined by manufacturing costs at the moment. The input costs of lithium is not going up because there's not enough lithium. And if supply of lithium does get constrained in the future, then there are alternative chemistries that are not supply limited. The assumption that the price of lithium won't go up if we try to use it for grid storage is bad economics. Let me put the staggering mismatch between battery supply and storage demand in perspective: * The US alone uses 500 GWh of electricity each hour. The world uses 2.5 TWh of electricity every hour.
* The entire world produces ~300 GWh of lithium ion batteries annually [1]. If we actually tried to provision one hour's worth of electricity storage the price of batteries would skyrocket, because there isn't enough supply to meet demand. We could provision one hour's worth of storage even if we bought every single lithium ion battery produced anywhere in the world for a whole year. And this issue is going to become even worse as we switch from fossil fuels to electricity for heating, transportation, industrial chemical production, and so forth. 1. https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/14/global-lithium-ion-batt... |