China just has announced ambitious plans to install storage for 100 GWh by 2030. China's electric power generation capacity is 2200 GW (in 2020). That's not even enough to provide electricity for 5 minutes....
Don’t mistake a manufacturing limit for a tech scaling limit. While it may take decades to get there, batteries could do that; in the mean time, intercontinental HVDC connections could substitute for some of that storage (not all the storage all at once unless mining increases, but certainly plausible over the scale of a decade or so and we would need that timescale to build the renewables themselves anyway)[0], and the batteries are in addition to existing pumped hydro, and even in the current “low wind” scenario the UK is still getting 3.8 GW (~11%) from wind[1][2] rather than getting nothing.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28474201
Yes. There are basically so many different chemistries (and non-chemical storage methods) that the important question is “which type should we prefer” rather than “can we even do it”.
The way forward is wind and solar. Everything else shouldn't be focused on.
Nuclear is the only proven clean technology for base load generation. The only hiccup is political (i.e., people decided they don't like nuclear), and while it's a big political problem, the whole climate crisis is an enormous political problem. Yes, there's the waste to be disposed of, but we already have to manage some waste and once you have to safely manage a little nuclear waste it's a marginal increase in cost to manage a whole lot of nuclear waste.
Further, innovations in nuclear are making it cheaper, safer, and faster to build. Moreover, as another commenter pointed out, if we were willing to ease some of our restrictions on nuclear such that our nuclear plants didn't need to be a thousand times safer than our coal plants (but merely, say, twice as safe), then nuclear could be even less expensive and facilities built more rapidly.
Yes, wind and solar will play a major role in the future, but we incur tremendous risk by ignoring nuclear.
What about a no-wind scenario? I don't know what wind in the UK is like, but in Germany this happens quite often. In November 2015 wind output dropped to 0.2 GW (0.5% of its 40GW power rating) [1]. Hydro doesn't help in such a scenario (<4% in Germany), nor will bio mass (<10%).
[0] https://energycentral.com/c/ec/world-battery-production
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute (German)
Yes, but that doesn’t itself seem like an implausible economic shift given how large the existing fossil fuel sector is.
Challenging, sure — perhaps it is politically impossible, I wouldn’t know as I’m not at all politically astute — but physically it seems fine.
> Are there enough raw materials for this?
That part at least is fine. Earth is big, and while lithium is in the category “rare Earths”, it isn’t all that rare compared to what we need, and even if it was lithium isn’t even the only option for storage.
One of the things suggested in your [2] was long-distance HVDC to different weather zones, and Scandinavian (hydro? I’m unclear) storage. In principle we could also do antipodal HVDC (different time zone for day/night, different hemisphere for summer/winter), though on a previous thread I was encouraged to do the maths and realised the EU collectively would use a 1m^2 cross section conductor for current HVDC designs (if you wanted 100% substitution rather than it being merely part of the solution), and this will take quite a long time to mine at current rates.
> How much waste would there be, given the limited lifespan of those batteries?
No idea, but the current alternatives are “set lots of it on fire” (fossil fuels) and “bury a tiny quantity of extraordinarily dangerous stuff in scary artwork for geological timescales” (nuclear), and all it has to do is beat those.
IIRC the end-of-life batteries can be processed back into their raw material more easily than can the rocks we start with for fresh batteries.
No, it's not. Where did you get that from? Surely not from elementary school chemistry lessons, where you're taught that lithium is an alkali metal.
You’re right, of course. I’m not a chemist and it shows.
I don't think that all these are true.
Yes, the technology definitely exists.
But as far as I know there's no country (yet) that has existing infrastructure that merely needs some upgrades (with the effort for these upgrades being significantly smaller than the total effort that went into building the existing infrastructure or would be necessary for building completely new infrastructure) to enable storing of months worth of hydrogen.
So I wouldn't support the claim "You can store months worth of hydrogen ...".
> Accounting for the accepted use of the higher heat value (because inefficiency via heat can be redirected back into the system to create the steam required by the catalyst), average working efficiencies for PEM electrolysis are around 80% ... [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis_of_water#Industri...]
Storing hydrogen isn't that easy/cheap either.
So I'd guess we're going to see storage of energy in the form of liquid/liquefiable hydrocarbons (synthesized from hydrogen) like methanol or propane.
Nuclear has track record of decarbonizing entire industrial economy in just 10 years.
We dont have storage solution with such track record.
That's just the direct industry. The support industry for nuclear plant construction materials has also lost maturity and scale between first gen and new gen, as evidenced by the failure of upgrade materials in the So Cal Edison San Onofre plant. This is after decades of investment.
Because its so much less complicated to scale, my bet is on storage before any next round of new nuclear plants are built at scale. But we don't even need that much storage in the next decade, we mostly need far more renewable energy acceleration in very proven and fast, reliable rollouts.
It probably could have, if you priced carbon appropriately 50 or 60 years ago, but no one did so cars and various industrial processes never made the shift and other random things like cow burps it cant even theoretically fix.
Now it's too expensive to bother trying even for the bits it's suited to.
Ironically, the main thing that wpuld make nuclear cheaper, would be cheap energy storage as youd only need to uild enoigh plants to generate the average yearly demand and use tge storage to handle the varying loads.
And for the sake of the discussion, I think France can be fairly considered decarbonized, even if not really 100%.
Note that TFA refers to decarbonization of electricity generation only, which is the definition I use as well.
As far as I'm aware, even the 1st-generation MAGNOX reactors in the UK have longer to go to full decommissioning than the time that's passed since they were built.
"Proven" doesn't just mean "deployed at scale"; it also means "fully decommissioned". It's not fair to claim that nuclear is "clean", while leaving it to future generations to figure out how to actually clean up.
My bet is that the Japanese will build some huge newfangled storage facility. There'll be a big earthquake. The storage will meltdown/burn/whatever somehow. It'll cause a great big semi-permanent problem. Everyone will declare victory and shout 'at least it wasn't nuclear'.