[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 ...".

[Hypx_]

Hydrogen can be piped via exist natural gas pipelines and stored in existing natural gas salt caverns or abandoned oil wells. So all parts of that statement are true.

[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.

[Hypx_]

You store hydrogen like you store natural gas: In underground salt caverns. This allows for weeks or months of stored energy.

[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.