One argument that I often hear is that even if we go with batteries, they then need to be replaced every few years, and the electricity is mostly coming from non-renewable sources either way.
Despite this massive success the total CO2 emissions haven't changed. The electricity sector is obviously only responsible for around 24% of the total energy used in Germany. Therefore the renewable strategy only amounts to a 12% reduction.
One of the biggest problems that Germany suffers from is that the transportation sector still uses gasoline. Over the last 10 years people have started buying more cars and driving them for more miles. Less efficient diesel (which is taxed less than gasoline) cars also resulted in a minor increase in CO2 emissions. This completely negated the CO2 decreases thanks to renewable electricity.
If anything what holds back renewable energy is the total lack of mass market electric cars that can compete with ICEs and lack of charging infrastructure.
Battery technology is currently improving at such a high pace that we might never even need anything better than lithium ion batteries. Tesla has managed to reduce the cobalt content down from 14% to less than 3%. The yearly cost reductions even make cheap flow batteries which basically are just sulfuric acid with vanadium mixed in uncompetitive.
Which is pretty embarrassing, given the huge investment made. By that same measure, France is at almost 90% (74% nuclear, 15% renewable). Without further nuclear developments, Germany will depend either on fossils or on massive technological breakthroughs in solving the fluctuations caused by wind energy.
So just a few hours worth of storage are actually really useful to integrate a significantly higher amount of renewables in the power mix.
So I looked around. There is another company that would charge $0.19 for power consumed, and $0.20 for feed-in, with a catch. The catch is encoded in a complex formula, but it boils down to "we hit you hard if consume power during the 4 hour peak hour period at _any_ time during the 90 day billing period".
My battery isn't big enough to supply an entire day or act as a back up during an extended power outage - but it can easily shift the 4 hours power usage this plan needs. Just doing that makes a big difference since we produce twice what we use. Who would have thought just having a 4 hour battery could drop your power bill by 1/3?
Even more impressively, the battery says on the box it is good for 6,000 cycles. But they are full cycles, and if I just use it for 4 hours I'll never use a full cycle. It could last over 20 years if I only draw on it 4 hours a day.
[0] https://www.audiworld.com/articles/new-power-from-old-cells-...
Oil is a pretty nasty chemical too, so I don't know what the balance is.
[1] https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1002631/the-dark-side-of-chin...
> Mary Hutzler, senior fellow at the Institute for Energy Research in Washington D.C., said that solar panels are manufactured using hazardous materials — including sulfuric acid and phosphine gas — making them difficult to recycle. They also contain toxic metals like lead, chromium, and cadmium, which can be harmful to humans and are likely to leak from electronic waste dumps into drinking water supplies.
Chromium is only in CIGS, which is 0% of the market, Cadmium is only in CdTe, which is a few percent of the market and only manufactured in the US by First Solar. Lead is just in the solder, which is the same issue as with all electronics. How does the use of chemicals purely as part of the manufacturing process make the panel more difficult to recycle, if the material is not in the finished product? IER is a Koch funded nonsense.
13.5 million cumulative tonnes of solar waste in China by 2050 is not FUD at all, that's a statement of success in solar deployment.
Are you suggesting that recycling this magnitude of solar waste will be trivial, both environmentally and economically? The 30 year lifetime plus massive deployments leads logically to a recycling challenge that isn't often discussed. I'm not an expert in the field so I can't say enough to suggest it will be trivial or challenging.
Gut feeling given those kinds of numbers is that it will be both challenging and expensive.
Do you have better data?
https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/tag/climate-alarm...
I think that the point about 13.5 million tons of solar waste in China by 2050 is fine by itself. That's still orders of magnitude less waste than would be produced by sourcing equivalent electricity from coal. For comparison, Georgia's Plant Bowen alone has 21 million tons of coal ash sitting in unlined pits and leaching into the water:
https://www.southernenvironment.org/news-and-press/news-feed...
Reading the pie chart from the Sixth Tone article, it looks like about 3/4 of the solar waste material is aluminum, glass, and steel. Those all have efficient, long-established recycling processes. The polymer backsheets and encapsulants, silicon cells, and minor metals used in cell contacts and wiring (copper, silver) are more difficult to deal with because of their heterogeneous nature. The only valuable part of that ~3.375 million tons of heterogenous waste is the copper and silver content. Silicon is low-value and non-hazardous. The polymers need to be treated as plastic waste. Like most plastic waste, they can't be effectively recycled.
Certainly coal is worse. We should just be careful to not replace one problem with another. Obviously in mass, coal will dominate. It's most a question of raw material availability or economics of recycling that matter for the vast expansion of energy harvesting we're talking about here.
I'm glad that you as a knowledgeable person in the topic are not concerned about any negative implications of vast renewable buildout for electricity, transport, heating, and industry.
The one important possibly-constrained battery material is cobalt as a component of lithium-ion battery cathodes. But stationary storage batteries don't need to maximize energy density and therefore don't need to use the same cobalt-bearing cathodes as those in mobile electronics and electric vehicles. The key attribute of a stationary grid-storage battery is lifetime -- encompassing both calendar life and cycle life. Long-life batteries don't need cobalt if the energy density is negotiable.
FWIW you can see from my comment history that I have no qualms about the scalability or safety of nuclear power either. I think that deep decarbonization may require additional nuclear power. The cost trajectory for storage-backed renewables just looks more promising than the cost trajectory of new nuclear power right now. It appears that the least-cost decarbonization path will emphasize renewable/storage buildout until the marginal decarbonization cost rises high enough to justify more high-cost (but rock-steady) nuclear reactors.