Not cheap, but in no way a "fantasy". Certainly not in a world with sane carbon pricing.
It absolutely is a fantasy to use this for grid storage. To put this in perspective, the US uses 11.5 TWh of electricity each day. The entire world produces 300 GWh of batteries every year. In order to achieve the 12 hours of storage for 80% renewables we'd consume global battery production for several years. To reach the 3 weeks storage for 100% renewable we'd need 805 years of the entire world's battery production at current levels. Sure, battery production is set to double over the next decade. But we're still talking centuries worth of global battery production to fulfill the storage demands of just the United States. And we're ignoring the fact that batteries wear out after a few thousand cycles.
Again, the idea that batteries are going to make wind and solar feasible is a fantasy.
This point is largely moot because we don't even have the manufacturing capacity to deliver the amount of batteries required. We only build 300 GWh of batteries globally each year. To reach 12 hours of storage, the US would need 6 TWh - 20 years of global production at current production rates.
NMC chemistry (as used in Hornsdale) is good for 3000-4000 cycles, although it's about 50% more expensive than LFP, at least if you buy them from CATL.
This isn't going to be cheap. But it is feasible, and if you care about carbon I'm not sure how else you do it.
How about we use the carbon free method of generating electricity that France has used to generate most of it's electricity for close to half a century?
We don't have to wait for a miracle that makes batteries cheaper, we don't have to scale up battery production by several orders of magnitude. If we built ten nuclear plants for every one that exists in the US today, that's enough for 100% carbon free electricity generation. It'd also provide enormous amounts of water if we use the waste heat for desalination. It also wouldn't involves consuming massive areas of land for solar panels. It would only involve technologies that currently exist and that we have decades of experience working with.
I'm still leaning towards renewables for various reasons, but could be swayed - could you share any more details about where the 12 hour capacity requirement and costs mentioned come from?
note how this assumes that every joule you consume must have come from the storage system as if there were zero overlap between consumption and demand such that all energy had to pass indirectly through the battery system
also note how he typically treats reminders by others as claims of silver bullet panaceas: even if governments had devoted to fully switching to renewables and had solid plans distributed over multiple sources (solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, ...) and over multiple storage systems (synthetic fuel, batteries, flywheels, ...) in a way it sufficed our needs, it's not surprising that pointing at just one energy source or just one storage type, you'd arrive to the conclusion batteries, or solar won't suffice... even though in combination they might.
Excellent point: The power that's going to be displaced is during the evening and night, which is when peak energy consumption occurs. The power that's going to be displaced is even greater!
> note how this assumes that every joule you consume must have come from the storage system as if there were zero overlap between consumption and demand such that all energy had to pass indirectly through the battery system
I do no such thing, not all energy needs to pass through the battery system. Of course daytime energy use can draw on solar panels directly.
> also note how he typically treats reminders by others as claims of silver bullet panaceas: even if governments had devoted to fully switching to renewables and had solid plans distributed over multiple sources (solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, ...) and over multiple storage systems (synthetic fuel, batteries, flywheels, ...) in a way it sufficed our needs, it's not surprising that pointing at just one energy source or just one storage type, you'd arrive to the conclusion batteries, or solar won't suffice... even though in combination they might.
In combination they might suffice. Do we want to bet averting climate catastrophe on a solution that might work? Or on a solution that does work? We know that nuclear power can power all of a nation's energy demands. We have firsthand examples of this happening. It's not contingent on unproven technologies like synthetic fuels, grid-scale batteries, or massive farms of flywheels.
If you need to store half your generation on a diurnal cycle, add it on to the LCOE of ~$50/MWh for utility scale solar, and you are cost competitive with the LCOE of nuclear today.
Lithium battery production is going to skyrocket regardless of whether it's used for grid storage; we're going to need enough for a billion cars over the next decades, even if the world converted to nuclear. Prices will continue to fall just as they have.
I am a strong believer that we should have embraced nuclear, given what we know now about climate change. But starting in 2020 with next to nothing, we're just now passing parity where renewables are starting to win, and the gap is going to get larger.
Now imagine what is going to happen if the demand for batteries increases one thousand fold (which is what is necessary to make grid storage possible) over the course of a decade or two.
So why will scaling up battery demand a thousand fold over the course of a decade or two make it explode in price, but scaling up nuclear plant construction five hundred fold (from two to a thousand) not do the same?
You are putting your thumb on the scales. I think we're done here.
Understand that even just 1 hour of energy storage for the US exceeds global battery production. If we try to use batteries for gird storage we're going to experience a battery shock in the same vein as the oil shock. That'll be terrible, because it will stunt electric vehicle adoption. There are much better uses for batteries than grid storage.
We're both putting our thumb on the scale: You're claiming that we're going to see a 10x decrease in battery cost, despite surging demand for batteries. I'm explaining that nuclear built at scale will likely cost 4-5x less than current nuclear projects.
The difference is I have historical precedence to justify this statement. We did build nuclear at a much larger scale during the 1970s, and it did cost 4-5x less on average.
Will battery production scale up like oil production did over the course of 1900 to 1970? Maybe, but that's an entirely speculative claim. The reality is that if countries start attempting to purchase grid scale batteries, we're going to experience a battery shock in the same vein as the oil shock following the Arab oil embargo. If the US tries the purchase 1 hour worth of battery storage the price for that amount of batteries is infinite. Or undefined. Because 1 hour of battery storage for the US is greater the the total amount of battery production in the entire world. The mismatch between supply and demand is that large.
Increase in demand, leads to an increase in cost, which in turn incentivizes increased production. The production of batteries is forecasted to increase substantially, but it's still well below what's required for grid storage.
1. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/World-crude-oil-producti...
I haven't seen much in the way of true apples to apples comparisons. Most solar plants with storage don't have much storage. For instance I saw a link this week on HN for $30 + $15/MWh for solar + storage, but the storage was only one hour of the nameplate capacity.
Based on the falling prices of batteries, I don't think it will be long before solar + storage providing power evenly over 24h (an unrealistic worst case) becomes economical.
At a 30% capacity factor, assuming the batteries are charging for 8 hours and draining for 16, that plant would need 5x as much storage for a cost of $30 + $75/MWh.
More realistically you'd only need 3-4x as much storage as you get small amounts of sunlight later and earlier in the day, and demand curves are not flat. Halve the price of batteries, which already happened in the 2010s, and that's looking economical even with a zero price on carbon.
But most countries are pretty far from saturating solar potential, so you can still build solar without storage for a while. Once you need the battery backing, it's probably going to be cheap enough.
So if we (naively) multiply by 1000 we get 23,74€/MWh. And that is for the home market. I know battery storage doesn't scale linearly, but also if you were to build this as a highly-scaled farm, I'm sure prices would also drop as well.
That's not the the worst case. Solar output varies by season. So you have to have enough storage for multiple weeks. This also means you have to greatly over-provison solar panels so that they not only provide power, but also enough to charge batteries.
Solar is so cheap now that already panel generation capacity is frequently getting oversized compared to the potential inverter output, to maximize costs.
Future solar farm design will optimize seasonal generation capacity similarly; size your panels for the seasonal minimum, attach batteries, and you can have year round output of a firm amount with only hours worth of batteries.
You have seasonal, and inter-seasonal variability in a solar and wind output. You need to account for that, in an economy that requires orders of magnitude more energy then being provided by renewables and is still electrifing. What do you mean it's silly?
I've seen a few articles now where a baseline required battery storage is on the order of weeks. What do you mean a few hours is all that's required? What if you have a multi-day cloudy, wind-still weather? What do you do then?????
>size your panels for the seasonal minimum, attach batteries
No. You need to over-provison even for minimum seasonal output, because even in seasonal minimum you still need to charge your batteries. Winter is very long.
> only hours worth of batteries
If you don't mind constant blanks during periods of prolonged reduced wind/solar output...then sure. I don't what 'few hours' means - there's a day-night cycle every single day. Multi-day and highly variable multi-weeks where solar and wind output is minimal or none are relatively common.
Here's what should give you pause and maybe make you reexamine your confidence - nobody is actually building out a solar/wind/battery infrastructure - nobody. We're essentially expanding natural gas use and complementing it with solar/wind (there's a reason why Germany is singing multi-decade contracts to ship Russian natural gas, and why every natural gas company is pushing renewables). Natural gas is not a transitional technology to renewables. It's the end-state for renewables.
For seasonal variation, simply overbuilding is also a possibility. No storage would be needed at all in Minnesota, for example, until renewables get to 70% of consumed electrical energy.
And where's hydrogen going to come from? You need to overprovision renewables so that they not only provide power for now, but also store enough power (via batteries or hydrogen or whatever) to get around daily, seasonal and inter-seasonal variability.
And by the way, hydrogen from renewables is massively inefficient.
Overprovisioning renewables for immediate consumption works in tandem with hydrogen, since it means there will be times excess power is available to make the hydrogen.
The round trip efficiency of power->hydrogen->power through turbines will be maybe 33%. But this is FINE, if the capital cost of storing hydrogen in underground caverns is low enough and renewables are otherwise cheap enough (low LCoE).
Hydrogen gas would be useful for things like shipping. Such gas would likely be produced close to the port through thermochemical means, powered by a nuclear plant. This would minimize the amount of pipeline that needs to be built to transfer the gas to ships.
Not really. It has lower energy/mole. There is the possibility that if CO2 is present that microorganisms could react the two to make methane. But aside from that, where is this much greater complexity coming from? The equipment required for storing either is similar.
Hydrogen is already dealt with on a very large scale. If expanded to STP, the amount of hydrogen produced every year globally would occupy 700 cubic kilometers. This is not Power Point technology of the kind you find in pro-nuclear arguments.
Did you read my post? Because I explain how it's permeability and corrosion make it challenging to build long lasting containers to store hydrogen.
It's not the same technology to store methane. Methane can be liquified and kept as a liquid at room temperature. Hydrogen cannot, it must either be kept as a gas (drastically reducing it's energy density per liter) or cryogenically cooled. The scale at which it is produced, stored, and transported is not even remotely close to natural gas.
Show me where you get this figure that 700 cubic kilometers of hydrogen is produced yearly? And even if it is, using it for energy storage is much more challenging than using it for things like chemical production because the latter doesn't involve storing hydrogen for long periods of time.
The amount of hydrogen produced yearly doesn't hold a torch to Methane. 3.9 trillion cubic meters of natural gas are consumed yearly [1]. This works out to 2.7 trillion KG or 297 billion tons. By comparison, 70 million tons of hydrogen are produced annually [2]. We produce over 4000 times as much natural gas as hydrogen annually. I have no idea where you getting this idea that the hydrogen economy and natural gas economies are remotely close to the same scale.
> This is not Power Point technology of the kind you find in pro-nuclear arguments.
You're right, pro-nuclear arguments don't need to hand-wave away severe technological limitations. Because it actually works, and there are real-world examples of it working.
1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/282717/global-natural-ga...
2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production#:~:text=....
And did you read my post? There is already a great deal of equipment for manipulating hydrogen on an industrial scale. What, did you think they rip that stuff out every month? The issue you are raising is already well solved.
> It's not the same technology to store methane. Methane can be liquified and kept as a liquid at room temperature
The great majority of methane storage is underground as compressed gas, not cryogenic. Underground storage is cheap; the capacity in the US is a good fraction of the annual consumption of natural gas here. It is this long-proven technology I am referring to, which should have been clear from what I wrote earlier.
> Show me where you get this figure that 700 cubic kilometers of hydrogen is produced yearly?
World annual production of hydrogen is 70 million metric tons, or 7.0e10 kg.
https://www.iea.org/reports/the-future-of-hydrogen
The density of hydrogen gas at STP is less than 0.1 kg/m^3. Divide to get 7.0e11 m^3.
> We produce over 4000 times as much natural gas as hydrogen annually.
Globally, 6% of natural gas production is used to make hydrogen. I wasn't talking about hydrogen production by electrolysis; I was talking about total hydrogen production, to show that hydrogen is a material that global industry already has vast experience with.
If by "a great deal" you mean "a fraction of one percent of what is required". No, the issue I'm raising is not well solved. Currently hydrogen is used shortly after it's produced, typically for chemical manufacturing or oil refining. It's not being stored for long periods of time, nor is it being transported in anything close to the amount of natural gas.
> The great majority of methane storage is underground as compressed gas, not cryogenic. Underground storage is cheap; the capacity in the US is a good fraction of the annual consumption of natural gas here. It is this long-proven technology I am referring to, which should have been clear from what I wrote earlier.
That's assuming these underground storage will work with a substance that has greater permeability. And storage is only half the problem, it's also a matter of the infrastructure used to transport gas to the end user. Simply pumping hydrogen through the same pipelines as natural gas isn't as easy as it sounds. Hydrogen has greater permeability and turns metals into hydrides at pressure. Hydrogen pipelines need to be much more corrosion resistant.
To put this in comparison, the US has 2 million miles of natural gas pipelines [1]. It only has 900 miles of hydrogen gas pipelines [2]. Most hydrogen is produced near areas of demand, and is not transported for long distances or stored for long periods of time. There's research into carbon-fiber pipelines that could better resist corrosion, but this is not a mature level of technology. It's more feasible to pipe methane, and then use steam reforming on-site.
> The density of hydrogen gas at STP is less than 0.1 kg/m^3. Divide to get 7.0e11 m^3.
Volume doesn't matter, I converted the volume of methane produced to mass.
> Globally, 6% of natural gas production is used to make hydrogen. I wasn't talking about hydrogen production by electrolysis; I was talking about total hydrogen production, to show that hydrogen is a material that global industry already has vast experience with.
Excellent point, total hydrogen production is 70 million tons with most of it produced through steam reforming (which produces carbon dioxide). Electrolysis only accounts for 4% of hydrogen production: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production#Methods_of....
The fact that 6% of natural gas production is used to make hydrogen doesn't mean that our hydrogen production equals 6% of our natural gas production. Most of the natural gas used in steam reforming is used to produce heat. And methane is 75% carbon by mass.
To recap, we have 3 orders of magnitude less hydrogen production and hydrogen transport infrastructure. Even less if you only count hydrogen produced through electrolysis. This is in no way "a great deal of equipment for manipulating hydrogen at scale".
1. https://www.ncsl.org/research/energy/state-gas-pipelines.asp...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_pipeline_transport