[ViewTrick1002]

Or an iron air. Or flow battery. Or sodium. Or all manner of different lithium chemistries across NCA, NMC, LFP and so on.

We’re seeing the Cambrian explosion of battery technology. From early BEVs utilizing the highest performance to even deliver a viable product to a plethora of options depending on your use case.

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/02/25/google-to-deploy-worl...

Wasting trillions of tax money and decades of opportunity cost on new built nuclear handouts is extremely shortsighted.

[Manuel_D]

How about we don't bother with either fission or wind and solar? Just build fusion plants and be done with it. If we're comfortable betting trillions of dollars in infrastructure projects on the hopes that a heretofore unproven technology will pan out, let's be more ambitious than batteries!

Of course, there's no guarantee that any of those fission ideas will actually pan out. Likewise with these battery chemistries. Investing loads of money into intermittent sources with just the hope that some future battery chemistry will solve storage at grid scale is not what I'd call a wise plan.

[epistasis]

You don't seem to understand that batteries are a well proven technology being deployed on a massive scale today. This is not news, this is old:

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67205

Anybody who over the past few decades has been saying that we could not deploy batteries on a massive scale needs to reevaluate their bad assumptions, because they are wrong, and moreover we should not trust any of their current assessments until they can reconcile what they got wrong. The tech curves of batteries have been clear for decades, this tech development should not have been unexpected.

[Manuel_D]

Your link reports that the USA added 15 GW of battery storage in 2025. I'm not sure how this is supposed to demonstrate the feasibility of battery storage at grid scale. Let's actually express the scale in terms of numbers relative to our electricity demand:

* The USA uses 12,000 GWh of electricity per day

* The world uses 60,000 GWh of electricity per day.

* Global battery production in 2025 was ~1,600 GWh, of which 300 GWh was used for grid storage [1].

At our present production rates, it'll take 100 years to provision 12 hours worth of storage at 300 GWh per year. Batter production is set to increase to 6.8 TWh per year [2], but only 12% of that is predicted to go to grid storage, or about 800 GWh per year. Even at 2035 rates, we're looking at 37 years of production to fill 12 hours of storage (12 hour of electricity storage for 2025 electricity demand rates, which will be higher in 2035).

Yes, batteries are being deployed at a massive scale today. But electricity generation is on an even more massive scale that dwarfs battery production rates.

1. https://source.benchmarkminerals.com/article/global-lithium-...

2. https://www.mckinsey.com/features/mckinsey-center-for-future...

[epistasis]

> Your link reports that the USA added 15 GW of battery storage in 2025. I'm not sure how this is supposed to demonstrate the feasibility of battery storage at grid scale.

Mmmhmm, grid scale deployment is not grid scale now? You are redefining terms, which means you don't work in the field and are not at all familiar with the field, yet you make broad and sweep proclamations of incredulity that have no factual backing, and we are supposed to trust you purely on judgement?

You cite last year's deployment rate, without noting a massive increase in planned deployments for this year. You neglect to cite the year before it, which was much smaller. You looking at a puck headed to the goal, under a continuous accelerant force, and saying, "the puck is here, therefore it will never hit the goal." That's a ridiculous thing to assert, because you don't hold that afactual standard for any other technology, just batteries, yet seem to understand that all other technologies have continually changing amounts of producition.

BTW, your link is "demand" and disagrees with most other sources.

> At our present production rates

That kind of says it all, doesn't it? You think that present production rates are indicative of future production rates, which is an insane statement.

If nuclear has 0 GW new this year, how do you think it could ever get to 2GW/year, right?

You have no reasons for these strange beliefs that defy data and trends, you just assert incredulity. It's completely irrational.

[Manuel_D]

Again, you have to put the scale of battery production in the context of electricity demand. 300 GWh of battery storage being provisioned sounds like a lot until you put it in the context of 60,000 GWh of electricity consumed daily. There's a reason why proponents of battery grid storage never actually put their numbers in the context of electricity consumption.

I'm not expecting readers to trust me purely on judgement, I'm expecting them to do the math and realize that battery storage deployment and electricity demand are multiple orders of magnitude off, even with the projected increases in battery projection.

> That kind of says it all, doesn't it? You think that present production rates are indicative of future production rates, which is an insane statement.

Again, I did cite the projected production figures for 2035. Did you miss that part?

[rootusrootus]

> heretofore unproven technology

Battery technology seems like a proven technology to me?

[Manuel_D]

We've also performed fusion in a lab. That doesn't mean it'll be viable in production at scale.

What's the annual production figures for iron air batteries, flow batteries, etc.? Sodium batteries are at 9 GWh delivered in 2025. Google tells me that flow battery capacity is 500 MWh to 1 GWh, but doesn't provide any figures on actual production deliveries (production capacity is not the same as actual delivered production). There are no iron air battery facilities currently in production, with the earliest plant trying to open in 2028 with 500 MWh per year annual production.

None of your suggestions are remotely close to operating at grid scale, and there is zero guarantee that any of them will prove more feasible than lithium based battery chemistry.

[epistasis]

This sort of moving the goal posts is not convincing at all. First it was "batteries will never scale to grid usage" now it's "early days of production of a brand new chemistry are only at 9GWh". You seem to think that is somehow an indictment of the technology rather than a statement of an amazingly quick scale up, with no signs of stopping. That's just bad judgement to say "a rapidly scaling tech is at GWh scale even without much demand therefore it's useless".

Meanwhile, the statement that "fusion has been achieved in a lab" is optimism and wishful thinking beyond words. What energy return did that get? What was the cost? When will there be GE of generation, mic less basic safety engineering?

Those who advocate against the shipping reality of batteries, and moreover assume that they will get more expensive, are not using numerical thinking and are not thinking like scientists, engineers, or technologists. They are merely rooting for a tech like a sports team. Nuclear does not need any more fans, it needs engineers and scientists that can achieve some sort of radical breakthrough that makes it a desirable tech.

[Manuel_D]

> First it was "batteries will never scale to grid usage"

You're inventing a straw man that's easier for you to attack.

No goalposts are being moved. My point was, and still is, that batteries do not presently scale sufficiently to make a predominantly wind and solar grid feasible, and our current projections even a decade out do not see them scale to that point either.

We don't know if some breakthrough in battery chemistry will make it scale. Could such a breakthrough transpire? Sure. But will it happen? We don't know. And thus we should not gamble massive infrastructure spending on the assumption that this breakthrough will happen.

[mpweiher]

At this point, nuclear fusion is a safer bet than grid scale battery backup.