[tjansen]

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....

[ben_w]

> 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.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28474201

[1] https://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/

[2] https://gridwatch.co.uk/demand/percent

[throwaway894345]

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.

[oezi]

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.

[throwaway894345]

> 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.

[foxfluff]

What's driving the price decrease in wind?

[jhgb]

Economies of scale, largely.

[ben_w]

> 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”.

[vagrantJin]

Yeah, I don't think it's an either or science decision any more than its likely a business-cum-political situation.

[nradov]

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.

[adrianN]

Then why do countries rely on foreign oil, gas, and coal all the time?

[ephbit]

Because they at least can store months worth of gas/oil/coal on their own territory.

[adrianN]

You can store months worth of hydrogen from electrolysis too.

[ephbit]

The way I interpret your claim is: that not only is it feasible in regard to the technology being available, but also that it is economically feasible _and_ the currently existing infrastructure does not need to be redone differently from scratch but can instead be augmented/upgraded to allow storage of months worth of hydrogen.

I don't think that all these are true.

Yes, the technology definitely exists.

But as far as I know there's no country (yet) that has existing infrastructure that merely needs some upgrades (with the effort for these upgrades being significantly smaller than the total effort that went into building the existing infrastructure or would be necessary for building completely new infrastructure) to enable storing of months worth of hydrogen.

So I wouldn't support the claim "You can store months worth of hydrogen ...".

[nradov]

You can't really store bulk hydrogen nearly as easily as natural gas, liquid fossil fuels, or coal. Hydrogen is less volumetrically efficient, leaks out faster, and causes embrittlement in common alloys.

[tjansen]

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%).

[0] https://energycentral.com/c/ec/world-battery-production

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute (German)

[ben_w]

> 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.

[jhgb]

> while lithium is in the category “rare Earths”

No, it's not. Where did you get that from? Surely not from elementary school chemistry lessons, where you're taught that lithium is an alkali metal.

[pfdietz]

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.

[ben_w]

News articles that want to dismiss renewables seem to often call it that.

You’re right, of course. I’m not a chemist and it shows.

[ZeroGravitas]

Also worth noting that "rare earths" aren't rare (nor are they earths), that's just their name.

[adrianN]

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.

[nradov]

Electrolysis is extremely inefficient. It's unlikely to be a practical means of grid scale energy storage any time soon.

[jhgb]

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.

[ephbit]

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...]

[adrianN]

Yeah round trip efficiencies are very bad, but at scale it's cheaper than batteries as far as I know.

[pfdietz]

The two storage modes are complementary. Batteries would be good for diurnal storage, hydrogen for longer term and rare event backup.

[ephbit]

Something makes me think that storing weeks worth of electricity isn't going to happen in the near future (< 30 years).

Storing hydrogen isn't that easy/cheap either.

So I'd guess we're going to see storage of energy in the form of liquid/liquefiable hydrocarbons (synthesized from hydrogen) like methanol or propane.

[dv_dt]

By recent performance, if we build nuclear we are decades away.

[tjansen]

Even if that's true, at least we would be betting on proven technology. What makes you think that unproven technology for storage can be built faster?

[dv_dt]

By the number of abandoned nuclear projects in the west, it’s not proven.

[korantu]

In this case 'proven' means was ever deployed at scale and worked successfully.

Nuclear has track record of decarbonizing entire industrial economy in just 10 years.

We dont have storage solution with such track record.

[dv_dt]

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.

[ZeroGravitas]

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.

[pfdietz]

And if you wanted to power the world with nuclear, you'd need breeder reactors or seawater U extraction. Burner reactors powering the world would go through a megaton of natural uranium each year.

[korantu]

South Korea can build nuclear on time and on budget, so it is possible.

And for the sake of the discussion, I think France can be fairly considered decarbonized, even if not really 100%.

Note that TFA refers to decarbonization of electricity generation only, which is the definition I use as well.

[denton-scratch]

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.

[autoliteInline]

>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'.