[cycomanic]

> The problem with battery supply is that it would be better to use that supply on EVs to displace oil rather than on massive stationary grid storage for intermittent sources.

If your electricity generation is fossil moving to EVs is of questionable benefit.

> Instead, for the maximum cleaning up of energy, we should build nuclear for the grid and use batteries on transportation.

We are talking about solar power costs exponentially dropping and your suggestion is to build nuclear, the slowest to build and already much less economical than solar. By the time your nuclear power plants are build you could buy ~10 times the capacity in solar and likely would not need any battery storage.

[semi-extrinsic]

Once the energy storage demand follows the PV exponential curve a little longer, it will be obvious to everyone that batteries won't cut it, and you will see people starting to deploy stuff like hydrogen electrolysis and liquefaction for storage combined with hydrogen fired gas turbine powerplants.

Several of the established players are close to achieving dry-low-NOx 100% hydrogen gas turbines. Then you are talking about >500 MW power per unit and a thermodynamic efficiency of >65%. If you are in the "extremely abundant but too variable renewable power" scenario, these things will be the major stabilisers. You can easily imagine smoothing out even seasonal fluctuations with them.

[adrianN]

Even if electricity generation is from coal, EVs produce less CO2 than ICEs, because big power plants are much more efficient than small engines. Plus all the other benefits they have, especially in cities.

[cycomanic]

This is quite disputed still, mainly because of the high weight of the batteries and the large energy cost of manufacturing these batteries. The studies I'm aware of, pretty much agree on that for 100% coal based electricity, ICEs are better, and for 100% renewables EVs are better. The dispute is at what percentage EVs become better.