Batteries are so expensive that it is unclear whether they will ever solve the large scale storage problem: yes they're getting cheaper, but they have to continue to get cheaper for a long time before they're suitable, and it's unclear whether fundamental limits will be hit before that. If battery technology improves to the extent that it becomes viable for large scale storage, then wind and solar can become our main source of energy. Until then, nuclear is the only proven solution. Betting on batteries now amounts to gambling with the planet.
Batteries are not supposed to solve the large scale storage problem. They're best at solving the small scale storage problem. Recently they solved the problem of small scale storage on wheels.
> If battery technology improves to the extent that it becomes viable for large scale storage, then wind and solar can become our main source of energy.
Batteries are not the only way of storing electricity.
Is it? Are you taking into account battery degradation from 1 cycle every day? The vast majority of battery chemistries won't last more than 3-4 years under those circumstances, and those that would are either much more expensive or experimental.
As of now storing 10kWh at 1kW costs around 1000$ from the cells alone. If you're changing them every 3 years then you have to spend 10 000$/kW over 30 years whereas nuclear is the same price per kW for a 30 year period.
Hauling a lot of water up a mountain at times of low demand, and releasing it through a turbine at times of high demand, is a type of battery; it seems to me a reasonable approach to smoothing supply and demand for wind/solar.
I agree that it's going to be a long time before grid-scale chemical batteries can help much with demand-smoothing.
The latest US plan aims for a 95% carbon free grid by 2035. They could have aimed for 100%, but it's cheaper to start electrifying more things at that point, as 95% carbon free electricity powering a heat pump is better than burning gas for heat. They therefore get the eqivalent of 105% carbon reduction for the same cost, more than they'd get by focusing on the final 5% of carbon on the grid.
As far as I know, few people suggest (Lithium-)batteries for long term storage. Electrolysis, optionally followed by turning the Hydrogen into Methane, seems like a much more scalable solution. That works at scale today, it's just too expensive to make sense at this point. Then there are other types of batteries that might become much cheaper in the future, perhaps redox-flow batteries or something like that.
According to people I talked with, who did analysis for "Green hydrogen" as storage method, assuming Poland - we would need something along the line of 150% peak production, locally, before it started moving the needle at all - and I'm not sure of this wasn't in combination with nuclear (though limited by the idiotic free market on electricity).
All of that assumes that the demand doesn't go up... Which is not compatible with things like climate goals
We are decades away from having enough storage to make wind and power a reliable power source. There is not even technology that would scale up enough to store a country's power for weeks or at least a few days.
China just has announced ambitious plans to install storage for 100 GWh by 2030. China's electric power generation capacity is 2200 GW (in 2020). That's not even enough to provide electricity for 5 minutes....
> There is not even technology that would scale up enough to store a country's power for weeks or at least a few days.
Don’t mistake a manufacturing limit for a tech scaling limit. While it may take decades to get there, batteries could do that; in the mean time, intercontinental HVDC connections could substitute for some of that storage (not all the storage all at once unless mining increases, but certainly plausible over the scale of a decade or so and we would need that timescale to build the renewables themselves anyway)[0], and the batteries are in addition to existing pumped hydro, and even in the current “low wind” scenario the UK is still getting 3.8 GW (~11%) from wind[1][2] rather than getting nothing.
Do we have the lithium/etc reserves to meet the storage needs for the entire planet? Nuclear is proven and if we claim to believe that climate change is an existential threat I don’t know why we would pin all our hopes on solar and wind and some to-be-discovered storage solution. To be clear, I’m not against solar and wind—on the contrary, I want a diverse clean energy portfolio. But wasting time emitting while we pray for a storage solution for wind/solar seems utterly foolish.
Sorry, but Nuclear is just proven to fail. Even if we would reverse course on Nuclear today it would be 20 or 30 years until the plants would be build. By that time solar and wind will another magnitude cheaper.
The way forward is wind and solar. Everything else shouldn't be focused on.
> Nuclear is just proven to fail ... the way forward is wind and solar
Nuclear is the only proven clean technology for base load generation. The only hiccup is political (i.e., people decided they don't like nuclear), and while it's a big political problem, the whole climate crisis is an enormous political problem. Yes, there's the waste to be disposed of, but we already have to manage some waste and once you have to safely manage a little nuclear waste it's a marginal increase in cost to manage a whole lot of nuclear waste.
Further, innovations in nuclear are making it cheaper, safer, and faster to build. Moreover, as another commenter pointed out, if we were willing to ease some of our restrictions on nuclear such that our nuclear plants didn't need to be a thousand times safer than our coal plants (but merely, say, twice as safe), then nuclear could be even less expensive and facilities built more rapidly.
Yes, wind and solar will play a major role in the future, but we incur tremendous risk by ignoring nuclear.
> Do we have the lithium/etc reserves to meet the storage needs for the entire planet?
Yes. There are basically so many different chemistries (and non-chemical storage methods) that the important question is “which type should we prefer” rather than “can we even do it”.
While intercontinental HVDC interconnects are technically feasible, no major world power would ever depend on those for essential power supplies. It's just too risky if foreign countries can cut off your electricity during a war or other crisis. Energy independence is strategically critical in a way that transcends economics.
I guess a manufacturing limit is bad enough. The global battery production is expected to reach 2063 GWh/year by 2028 [0]. That wouldn't be enough to store China's electricity consumption for a single hour. The production would need an increase by several orders of magnitude. Are there enough raw materials for this? How much waste would there be, given the limited lifespan of those batteries?
What about a no-wind scenario? I don't know what wind in the UK is like, but in Germany this happens quite often. In November 2015 wind output dropped to 0.2 GW (0.5% of its 40GW power rating) [1]. Hydro doesn't help in such a scenario (<4% in Germany), nor will bio mass (<10%).
> The production would need an increase by several orders of magnitude.
Yes, but that doesn’t itself seem like an implausible economic shift given how large the existing fossil fuel sector is.
Challenging, sure — perhaps it is politically impossible, I wouldn’t know as I’m not at all politically astute — but physically it seems fine.
> Are there enough raw materials for this?
That part at least is fine. Earth is big, and while lithium is in the category “rare Earths”, it isn’t all that rare compared to what we need, and even if it was lithium isn’t even the only option for storage.
One of the things suggested in your [2] was long-distance HVDC to different weather zones, and Scandinavian (hydro? I’m unclear) storage. In principle we could also do antipodal HVDC (different time zone for day/night, different hemisphere for summer/winter), though on a previous thread I was encouraged to do the maths and realised the EU collectively would use a 1m^2 cross section conductor for current HVDC designs (if you wanted 100% substitution rather than it being merely part of the solution), and this will take quite a long time to mine at current rates.
> How much waste would there be, given the limited lifespan of those batteries?
No idea, but the current alternatives are “set lots of it on fire” (fossil fuels) and “bury a tiny quantity of extraordinarily dangerous stuff in scary artwork for geological timescales” (nuclear), and all it has to do is beat those.
IIRC the end-of-life batteries can be processed back into their raw material more easily than can the rocks we start with for fresh batteries.
There was a propaganda effort trying to paint renewables as dirty, pointing to environmental problems with Chinese REE refining. Shellenberger was hawking this at one point, claiming PV uses rare earth elements. One still hears echoes.
We're also pretty far away from the kinds of renewable penetration where you actually need a lot of storage, so we have plenty of time left to build more batteries and electrolyzers.
It's not just a means of energy storage; it's a method for producing a vital chemical feedstock. If your main alternative is processing natural gas, building more electrolysers is a no-brainer. You'll have to do it no matter what the efficiency, since we just don't have a better way.
80 per cent is what you call extremely inefficient ... what percentage would be "efficient" then in your opinion?
> Accounting for the accepted use of the higher heat value (because inefficiency via heat can be redirected back into the system to create the steam required by the catalyst), average working efficiencies for PEM electrolysis are around 80% ... [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis_of_water#Industri...]
Nuclear is in an awkward place. All of the proven last gen designs are considered too risky to build new now. But it also seems that the next gen designs are not proven at all in terms of construction timelines or buildability. For example, many next gen US nuclear projects were canceled after continuous schedule and budget overshoots. The completed next gen French reactor in China, for example is showing unexpected behavior and has been temporarily taken offline for review, and other next gen French design builds are, like the US designs and projects, behind schedule and over budget.
That's just the direct industry. The support industry for nuclear plant construction materials has also lost maturity and scale between first gen and new gen, as evidenced by the failure of upgrade materials in the So Cal Edison San Onofre plant. This is after decades of investment.
Because its so much less complicated to scale, my bet is on storage before any next round of new nuclear plants are built at scale. But we don't even need that much storage in the next decade, we mostly need far more renewable energy acceleration in very proven and fast, reliable rollouts.
Nuclear has never decarbonized an entire industrial economy, so by that definition, nuclesr is nkt "proven technology".
It probably could have, if you priced carbon appropriately 50 or 60 years ago, but no one did so cars and various industrial processes never made the shift and other random things like cow burps it cant even theoretically fix.
Now it's too expensive to bother trying even for the bits it's suited to.
Ironically, the main thing that wpuld make nuclear cheaper, would be cheap energy storage as youd only need to uild enoigh plants to generate the average yearly demand and use tge storage to handle the varying loads.
I'm not aware of any nuclear power plant anywhere having been fully decommissioned, with all waste safely stowed away, safe from earthquakes and plane-crashes.
As far as I'm aware, even the 1st-generation MAGNOX reactors in the UK have longer to go to full decommissioning than the time that's passed since they were built.
"Proven" doesn't just mean "deployed at scale"; it also means "fully decommissioned". It's not fair to claim that nuclear is "clean", while leaving it to future generations to figure out how to actually clean up.
>There is not even technology that would scale up enough to store a country's power for weeks or at least a few days.
My bet is that the Japanese will build some huge newfangled storage facility. There'll be a big earthquake. The storage will meltdown/burn/whatever somehow. It'll cause a great big semi-permanent problem. Everyone will declare victory and shout 'at least it wasn't nuclear'.