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The economic reality is that battery on the grid is out-competing gas peaker plants in a lot of places because even with the current scarcity and price levels in the battery market, it seems economical to buy them by the MWH.

Technically, peak prices dropping because of solar/wind is a problem of everything else being too expensive. Battery storage solves that problem by being cheaper. Of course we'll need many TWH and the current production levels are still measured in GWH. But as we learned last week, Tesla is looking to fix that. But even at current price levels picking something expensive like lithium ion seems to make sense for some. Of course better options are possible and being worked on. But it's competitive already. We're talking about making it even more competitive.

This is actually proven technology; there are a growing number of places that have sharply reduced their conventional power generation and vastly reduced cost simply by deploying modest amounts of battery.

Basically the notion of a peaker plant seems to be reserved for recovering the sunk cost in prematurely unprofitable gas and coal plants. Building new peaker plants is not really a thing. The economic outlook for investors behind such plants is downright depressing as they can look at trends in the market and extrapolate sub 0.01 $/kwh solar prices are coming (rounded down, this already happened actually).

That's also why nuclear is not really viable because its closer to 0.1 $/kwh. That's an order of magnitude difference. It's too expensive. Too risky (financially). Too uncertain. And that's before you consider the general mood (irrational as that may be) against nuclear.

Sure, solar + natural gas is cheaper than nuclear. But that's not a solution to climate change. The amount of battery storage that some plants use is negligible compared to the 11.5 TWh that the US uses on average every day. The entire country has 8 seconds worth of battery storage.

The reality is that nobody has a plan to power a country with renewables. The storage requirements to do so are staggering. The US would need 12 hours of storage to get to 80% renewables - and we'd still be burning fossil fuels for the remainder. To get to 100% renewables we'd need 3 weeks of storage: https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-stora...

Intermittent sources are fundamentally not viable as a primary form of generation. Solar is currently being used to supplement fossil fuel generation during the day, but one you saturate daytime power generation the usable energy you get from solar drops substantially.

> The economic reality is that battery on the grid is out-competing gas peaker plants in a lot of places because even with the current scarcity and price levels in the battery market, it seems economical to buy them by the MWH.

Do you have any citation for this because I've seen no evidence that this is true. The largest grid scale lithium battery is barely a drop in the ocean by comparison to the energy consumption of the grid. It is only used for short term grid frequency stabilization, which it does admirably.

I just read the news in the energy market. I think California just ordered a few MwH of battery from Tesla. They seem to be doing a brisk business of selling batteries to grid providers in a market that is entirely supply limited. There are loads of companies working on alternate storage technologies.

You are right that there is very little right now. But I'd counter that that is growing rapidly and that that is inspired by those investments paying off for their early adopters.

Short term stabilization is actually the key problem that needs solving with energy peaks (which are inherently short term). The sun comes out quite reliably every day to provide a predictable minimum of power levels. Basically solar and wind combined are quite OK. Things like seasonal variation are actually more predictable and something you can plan for. Extended freak periods of clouds with no wind across an entire continent is not a really thing. Such effects tend to be local and temporary. So we can fix a lot by simply moving power around (with cables, another proven technology).

The unspoken presumption with storage critics is that we'll need unspecified days/weeks/months of storage for such apocalyptic conditions. As far as I can see this is simply wrong and not something that energy companies are putting a lot of serious money on the table for.

I've actually seen zero credible evidence for this; not even a ballpark number of how many TWH of storage that would be needed. So, I'll bounce that question right back at you: how much TWH/PTW do you think is needed/economically justifiable and why? That will allow us to put a price tag on it.

The reality is that interconnected grids means the sun is always shining somewhere and wind turbines out on the water or wherever are always providing some power somewhere. If you look at the market, grid connectivity and storage are exactly two things where investments are happening. Long term storage seems much less of a concern for grid providers. Mostly 2-4 hours seems to be the sweet spot of what grid providers seem to be spending on.

In order to reach 80% renewables we'll need 12 hours of storage. In order to reach 100% renewables we'll need 3 weeks of storage: https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-stora...

For grid stabilization in the UK we already have 28GWh of pumped hydro storage. I'm not an expert in sizing grid infrastructure but I expect we'd need storage of several times that to balance a less dispatchable grid.

The sun is always shining somewhere doesn't work for day / night solar production. Transmission losses are of the order of 0.5% per 100km. By the time you transmit power 20,000km there is nothing left.

Its <3 percent per 1000km if using high voltage DC and multiplicative not additive. So 0.97^(20000/1000)= 0.54. Just under half lost, not infeasible.

Also building enough battery capacity to offset the night is doable. UK annual consumption is around 300TWH, let's round to 1TWH a day.

The nighttime consumption is about half of the daytime's so only 33% needs to be saved.

So we need 350GWH of batteries. It will take a while, cost 35 Billion assuming 100 usd for 1 kwh. Or 2 billion a year or 0.6 cents per KWH of energy consumed.

I don't think you can really quote prices when you are talking about battery capacities on the order of the current world wide lithium battery production.

Also, it's interesting that Iceland, with their abundance of geothermal power, don't have an interconnection with Europe. That's only 1000km as the crow flies and yet hasn't been considered economically feasible yet.

There is no lithium shortage. E.g. Tesla is basically mining in Nevada in a place that has apparently more than enough for their quite ambitious roadmap. Also money quote from Elon Musk last week was that it's one of the most common elements in the world. Basically, we've only scratched the surface (quite literally) in terms of actively looking for the stuff as the demand for lithium at this scale is a fairly recent development.

As for geothermal, Iceland has geothermal; yes. So do other places. You're talking as if using that as an infinite source of energy is both cheap, feasible, and scalable. It's probably none of those things. Iceland has about 300K people, the UK has around 66M, so we're talking about 220x the energy demand. And running cables across the Atlantic. And doing a lot of infrastructure development in Iceland at the cost of many billions in a market that has energy prices trending down because of other clean energy options. Perhaps that's the reason that it was never really considered as an option.

Regarding the quoted prices, I think for the sake of argument this person was deliberately using numbers that are on the super conservative side. E.g. buying battery at 100$/kwh would probably be a spectacularly bad deal considering prices are already dipping below that (and that's for car batteries). Also, for the sake of argument assuming everything happens right now at today's prices is arguably not how this would play out at all. But as he's argueing, even if you make such assumptions it's still doable. So, it's likely to end up being a good deal cheaper than projected there as this plays out over the next decades as prices for batteries continue to drop and we figure out how to do this at scale.

You have to be very careful with claims about relative abundance. Take water as an example, 2/3 of our planets surface is covered in it and yet for practical purposes it's useless to us for drinking or watering crops. Regardless, I didn't make any claim about abundance of lithium, only the current manufacturing capacity.

My point about Iceland is they already have huge amounts of geothermal power and they should be able to develop it and sell it back to Europe as green electricity. Currently 70% of their power consumption is used to smelt aluminium so it's not like they are constrained.

> Take water as an example, 2/3 of our planets surface is covered in it and yet for practical purposes it's useless to us for drinking or watering crops.

It's not useless, it just requires too much processing and transportation to be practical. The issue with water is that for what we need it, we really require enormous amounts of it. This is not the case with lithium, where required amounts are trivial in comparison. Just to make the point: a truck-load full of lithium is worth around $300,000. To desalinate the same truck-load worth of salt water, it costs about $20, that is, 4 orders of magnitude less. If you don't have to desalinate, but instead can just draw fresh water, it will be around $1-2 for a truck-load. Obviously, trucking in water is still too expensive, because we need lots and lots of water, truly insane amounts compared to anything else.

You are forgetting wind.

The problem is there simply are not that many batteries. On a small scale the Tesla Australia battery is making money nad its out-competing gas peakers. But we don't jet have batteries of the scale to cover the really long substained drops.

Even the most optimistic projections about battery fall short of what is needed to replace gas peakers.

Lets hope Tesla, LG, CATL can spit out insane amounts of batteries and we maybe get some dispatchable CSP.

Just a day ago someone on HM mentioned that the Diablo Canyon plant is being shut down because it would need a 7B USD cooling system (evaporation towers), and building 40 GWh storage would cost less.

(I found this ~400 USD / kWh for 4 hours number, that gives 17.5 GW for 4 hours for 7B. by W Cole at NREL.)

I don't doubt that the Diablo Canyon upgrade is expensive, and various interests have been set on killing that plant for decades, but there is no way on earth you're getting 40 GWh of storage in central California at any price within a decade.

The total pumped and gas storage capacity of the United States is only like 25 GWh. Building that would require a majority of the total battery production of the entire planet for a year, and most of that wouldn't even be the right kind of batteries regardless of what technology they settled on. Some sort of dream moonshot project to build that would be awesome, but is completely outside the scope of any modern commercial endeavor.

There are 2 scenarios:

1. We drastically reduce fossils using regulation / legislation, in which case they become harder to get (eg more expensive) than the alternatives for most users.

2. We don't reduce fossils, in which case we're left with just trying to outcompete energy supply so nobody wants to pump the cheap oil and gas from the ground anymore.

Option 2 is never going to work and is equivalent to just giving up on fighting climate change.

>Option 2 is never going to work and is equivalent to just giving up on fighting climate change.

And option 1 is no better. You tax the crap out of fossil fuels forcing billions of people's standard of living to go substantially backwards, they start revolting, maybe have you lined up and shot, people like me say "told ya so" and we're left with shattered economies, refugee crisis and basically all the bad things climate change is going to bring anyway.

We're long past the point of solving this easily. Whatever option we pick is going to hurt given the choice between suffering at the hand of other people and suffering at the hand of nature I think the latter is going to result in a lot less overall suffering because the correlation between land becoming uninhabitable or non-productive and revolt is much weaker (or at the very least it takes longer) than the correlation between oppressive taxation/regulation and revolt. The climate change bill is gonna come due regardless. Having governments try and collect proactively is just gonna give is broken governments to go with our broken planet.

Pretty gloomy view!

Taxing fossils yields revenue that has to be used for thngs like income transfers or breaking dependency on fossils to offset these steps back.