Problem is, this applies "in reverse" to battery technology. Don't buy 1TW of storage today, buy 500MW and wait to see what's coming. Defensible, but possibly not what we actually need.
That is why so little storage is being built, thus far. Costs for storage are falling even faster than wind or solar ever did, because there is nothing to be overcome except limits on scaling manufacturing. The physics of energy storage, chemical schemes excepted, are a matter of freshman physics, so the drive is only how to apply the same principles more cheaply.
Simplicity is the greatest virtue: if you can make a storage system with just one moving part, you have the makings of a winner. Many involve anchoring something to the sea floor: an air bladder with a hose to an air pump and turbine onshore, charged by pumping in air; a float with a cable down to a pulley, thence to a winch and motor/generator onshore, charged by dragging the float down to the bottom; an air tank with an electric pump/turbine just wired to shore, charged by evacuating the tank.
The overwhelming majority of storage will not be batteries, ever. But molten metal batteries have massive advantages over lithium, longevity and heat tolerance probably most important. Iron-air batteries are much cheaper.
Hydrogen and ammonia synthesis will not be as cheap as the others, but have the massive advantage that, because tankage is cheap and transportable, storage capacity is unlimited; and when as much tankage as you care to keep is full, any extra generating capacity yields a high-demand product, thus extra revenue. Furthermore, if your local storage gets looking likely to run dry, you just buy more.
Compatibility with existing natural gas generators is a plus; thus, compressed air, liquified nitrogen, hydrogen and ammonia. Burning something with compressed air increases efficiency.
Energy Vault is bald grift, the Theranos of storage.
Why not? Lithium iron phosphate batteries work fine, don't cost too much, don't have a thermal runaway problem, are good for 10,000 cycles, require little maintenance, have good energy density per unit volume, and you can buy them right now. They're heavier than lithium ion batteries, but in stationary installations, that doesn't matter. Something better may come along, but they're good enough to deploy now.
Utility batteries, where used, will be iron-air or molten metal. Light weight is no virtue in that use.
If those numbers are correct and we want cars that each have 50 kWh batteries, we can have up to about 2.2 billion cars, so we either get more lithium (seawater is 1000x more in quantity but IIRC not economical at this time), or we don’t all get to have electric cars.
This is making me go back to an older preference of mine, which is to have a really fat wire (order of 1m^2 cross section) going around the planet. Take years (literally) to mine and process that quantity, but in principle you can get winter solstice pre-dawn energy from your antipode. The losses, while large, are not catastrophic.
Long distance transmission has become very practical as the top-line cost of generation has fallen far below historic lows.
You don't need a square meter in cross section. There will be a hell of a lot of long distance transmission lines. Singapore is all in on one to northern Australia. UK has signed a deal for one to Africa.
If there’s any single entity I expect to have both the economic power and originational capacity to do that, it’s the Chinese government.
The main reason is that the cables are much cheaper than the storage (so a massive incentive if you can do it), but 15000 km * 1m^2 * density of copper is 1.3e8 tons, and current global annual production is 2e7 tons, and a similar problem for aluminium. Need a lot of organisation of the wider economy to pull that off.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/11/15/chile-wants-to-export...
Pretty big categorical statement.
The problem with the "one moving part" storage systems is that their energy density is surprisingly bad. Gravitational potential energy in particular is terrible. Compressed air systems can be OK, especially the ones using underground reservoirs, but have an efficiency limited by the physics of gas expansion.
It's pretty hard to beat redox reactions for energy density. As you say, tankage is cheap, so can this be done with "flow batteries"?
But the real reason lithium is winning is the incredible power of path dependence and manufacturing efficiency. Is it the optimal chemists's whiteboard solution to churn out a billion 18650 cells? No. Is it the one that's easier to actually do in the world as it exists today? Possibly.
Chemical synthesis systems suffer on cost per watt to charge, but hit it out of the park on joules stored per dollar. Further pluses are bulk-shippable storage media that may be bought and sold, and can be discharged using existing gas turbines, even in places where you have not installed any synthesis apparatus.
It's probably best if we increase the carbon price until the market figures out how much storage is economical.
Huh? Why would you not charge your utility battery bank with surplus solar or wind power?
Bonus: at the point when solar or wind power would be curtailed (when it is generating more supply than the grid demands), is also when the wholesale price per MWh is zero or negative, making it free or profitable to charge your batteries.
Because you spent the money on more generating capacity, instead, and displaced exactly that much more carbon emission.
You put any excess power on a transmission line to someplace else that would otherwise be burning fossil fuel, and collect revenue. Maybe spend that on more generation.
If you are maxing out your transmission lines, spend money building those out. The more of those you have, the more places you can get revenue from.
When it starts to look like there will be nobody left to sell your excess to, then build storage.
Just from an economic standpoint it can also be a valid choice to build storage next to unpredictable generating capacity, for example if you build a wind farm and want to sell during daytime (when prices are highest) as much as possible.
(Technically, a 100% renewable grid could go negative I'd there were separate subsidies, but as soon as renewable goes below that level it would just be shut off rather than pay money to generate.)
That is better though for when the renewable plant isn’t running.
But I do like the idea that these industries might actually be motivated to progress faster now if people hold off on getting on board. Seems like its enough of a reality that they can justify r&d to make the last push toward real competitiveness.
Then again my brains fried from work and I don't know what I'm talking about.
All I know is I want me some solar panels and an electric F150.
The best thing for a house power bank is a used-up electric car.
Instead, for the maximum cleaning up of energy, we should build nuclear for the grid and use batteries on transportation.
But in particular, the iron-flow battery story going around recently stinks pretty badly. It's being heavily promoted almost entirely by one company, ESS, and their first real client is -- wait for it -- SoftBank [1]. The academic reports on iron-flow batteries [2] make the technology sound a lot less mature than the ESS website [3], which incorrectly refers to vanadium and lithium as "rare-earth metals".
A 2018 publication [4] from Narayan's group at USC boasts that:
>Thus, by operating at 60°C and a pH of 3 with ascorbic acid and ammonium chloride, we achieved a coulombic efficiency of 97.9%. While this value of coulombic efficiency is among the highest values reported for the iron electrode in the context of the all-iron flow battery, further improvement in efficiency is needed for supporting repeated cycling.
However, further work by Narayan's group led them to replace iron chloride by iron sulfate in 2020 [5] which was celebrated by USC in a press release [6].
It was shortly after this that ESS burst onto the scene claiming iron chloride batteries with extremely long cycle life using "carbon composite" electrodes, "porous polyethylene separator" and a "polypropene spacer" [3], which are suspiciously similar to the graphite electrodes, mesoporous hydrocarbon-polymer-not-disclosed (Tokuyama A901 [7]) anion-exchange membrane, and polypropylene housing used in the Narayan group's 2016 paper [8] proposing all-iron-flow batteries for grid storage. It's worth noting that chemically unmodified polyethylene is probably not a suitable material for an ion-selective membrane, but it wouldn't even be the second-worst mistake on the page.
Yet ESS, despite having supposedly solved major problems that are obviously of scientific interest to active researchers, does not appear to have any names on its website, and cites no publications. Frankly, it sounds like another EEStor.
1: https://cleantechnica.com/2021/10/07/first-ess-iron-flow-bat...
2: https://dornsife.usc.edu/labs/narayan/all-iron-redox-flow-ba...
3: https://essinc.com/iron-flow-chemistry/
4: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S245191031...
5: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1149/1945-7111/ab84f8/...
6: https://news.usc.edu/166306/flow-battery-renewable-energy-el...
7: https://watermark.silverchair.com/jeecs_18_2_024001.pdf
8: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1149/2.0161601jes/pdf
A dollar spent on renewables buys several times what a nuke could produce, and immediately, not ten years from now and buying fuel in the meantime. The money spent just on the fuel over that time would mostly pay for building the renewables.
Is it possible to just spend infinite dollars today and solve the climate crisis by tomorrow?
https://www.lazard.com/media/451905/lazards-levelized-cost-o...
Every year the cost of nuclear increases because we have fewer examples of successful construction and more examples of failed construction. The industry is in shambles, effectively dead. The US attempts at construction of AP1000s resulted in 2/4 failing, and the other two reactors being several multiples behind in schedule and pricing. The latest excuse for the failure is that they began construction before design was complete, so of course they failed. However this was the request of the nuclear industry, in an attempt to bring down prices, and the entire regulatory approval process was changed to accommodate this, which was supposed to bring down prices and prevent the failure of construction. Look at any attempt to build nuclear in a modern economy and you will find failure, not success.
As for spending infinite dollars to solve climate change, no, that is not possible. There are real productive limits to capacity to build things. The solar, wind, and storage industries are growing at massive rates, but still its only barely enough to meet the speed needed for our energy transition.
If we had infinite money to spend on nuclear, we still would not be able to build sufficient new restore by, say 2040. In the US alone we would need to build ~100 reactors simply to replace those reaching their end of life. We do not have the construction capacity for that, much less a design to build, or willing financial backers.
For the foreseeable future, nuclear is a dying industry in the US, not because of regulation or public backlash, but because the industry can't build.
The only hope for nuclear in the US or Europe is for small modular reactors, a design that in the past has been rejected for being too expensive. But since it's closer to manufacturing (like a plane) than like construction, there's hope, even if it's a long shot.
I.e., if you are trying to scare up money for a big enough nuke plant to be worth installing, the stakeholders you would need on board will see noplace to skim off the money they demand to greenlight the project.
Thus far solar and wind seem thus far resistant to graft, for reasons that are easy to speculate about, but hard to prove.
It's much easier to take some graft off a super size construction project with few bidders and massive transaction costs compared to small repeatable transactions that happen with smaller projects.
Nuclear construction often ends up with people in jail. It's happening in South Carolina, and happened in South Korea too, and up until the corruption was found, SK had been touted as a modern nuclear success story that could maybe be replicated in the US.
So we are left with only China and Russia's Rosatom as the only builders that claim to be able to deliver at a reasonable cost. We just need to trust the builders enough to construct in our countries, with our workforces, and somehow get a hugely complex construction project with lots of high-precision welding and construction pours done on time and accurately.
Solar projects are useful at smaller sizes, so need fewer stakeholders, making it easier to find honest ones. People choosing to be involved with renewables are more often self-selected for idealism.
That's because the graft happens earlier in the process before the actual "build the thing" portion so you don't notice. The developer typically pisses away money directly or indirectly getting on the good side of the local powers that be before actually pulling the trigger on the project.
Contrast with nuclear or any other centralized power generation where the state gets involved. Sure, money gets pissed away in similar ways on those projects (pay off special interest X, promise a favorable rate for Y, etc) but it tends to not technically be graft because it's all done through the official processes.
Prices for big solar installations are in the public record. And for nukes. Recently North Carolina and Georgia spent, what, $15B for exactly 0 watts out. They were quoted another $10B to get the 2GW they had signed up for, which they had expected to pay, what, $8B for, total? They won't get any of it back.
The corruption tax on nukes is withering. Nobody involved wants the money to ever stop flowing, as actually delivering would cause.
The best I have seen for nukes is $2B/1GW, but nobody knows how to get that with any reliability; and that is discounted by a huge government disaster-insurance subsidy, and excludes ~$1B end-of-life decommissioning. I see $1B/1GW for recently finished solar projects, but prices are still falling fast.
No. Factories need to be build, infrastructure needs to be build with infinite money and an coordinated centrally planned effort it should be possible within 15 years to be net neutral.
This would include: electrifying all of africa, world wide giga grid, replacing all combustion motors, building a new fleet to replace all cargo vessels, build rail to curb all non trans ocean flights, radically cut down militaries all over the world, build a lot of heat pumps, building a lot of buildings in a carbon neutral way, also a lot of other environmental concerns (species protection, eco system protection) would need to be curbed for it to happen in 15 years, more flexibility if you relax that timeframe.
Modular thorium reactors would be a huge win if realized.
You need to watch some thorium debunking videos. I live near Indian Point, recently shut down. They tried thorium, early on. It cost too much. Every single thing about nukes costs too much.
I skimmed the Indian Point reactor -- it appears to be a non-LFTR reactor, and that seems to be where the excitement continues.
But yeah, renewables are great and only getting better. If we had taken a trillion dollars out of the fiasco of the Gulf Wars (ostensibly for "energy security") we could have done significant things. For example, I'm enamored with the possibilities of geothermal around the Yellowstone caldera -- if we could figure out how to do that without destroying the local environment.
Rebuilding The Grid with HVDC would help too, as well as an ammonia economy to utilize excess power from wind. It all seems very technically doable, it's the politics and petrol people that stand between us and a carbon free energy ecosystem (well, with reasonable exceptions for aerospace and other special cases)
Really, anything that needs a steam turbine is going to cost too much to compete.
If your electricity generation is fossil moving to EVs is of questionable benefit.
> Instead, for the maximum cleaning up of energy, we should build nuclear for the grid and use batteries on transportation.
We are talking about solar power costs exponentially dropping and your suggestion is to build nuclear, the slowest to build and already much less economical than solar. By the time your nuclear power plants are build you could buy ~10 times the capacity in solar and likely would not need any battery storage.
Several of the established players are close to achieving dry-low-NOx 100% hydrogen gas turbines. Then you are talking about >500 MW power per unit and a thermodynamic efficiency of >65%. If you are in the "extremely abundant but too variable renewable power" scenario, these things will be the major stabilisers. You can easily imagine smoothing out even seasonal fluctuations with them.
There has been some work on modding how well this could work for changing EV rebate incentives, but getting legislatures to adopt such complicated ideas is nearly impossible.
Another approach would be to add a realistic, risk-adjusted carbon tax to gasoline (probably north of $200/ton co2, or $2/gallon gasoline) and let the market sort it out. Unfortunately when it comes to car purchasing, consumers are less economically rational than even legislators.
Over the long term, any batteries sold are good batteries, because batteries exhibit large economies of scale. Profit on existing sales can fund new production facilities; incremental improvements in battery technology; R&D into capacity increases; improved distribution networks; R&D into new sources of lithium; and so on. The way you get dirt-cheap storage is to build lots of it.
In the more exotic architectures and chemistries, what's moving the needle is the exotic military or medical need, where the battery can be 10x more expensive on the OEM BOM and barely move the actual end unit price to the final user.
There is no realistic way to GENERALLY determine the price of the kWh coming out of a grid scale battery due to the large number of variables, such as battery lifepan, wholesale production rates, land and permitting cost, etc.
Capacitors are capable of delivering high levels of power but have relatively small energy storage capacity compared to batteries.
Grid scale batteries need to be sized in terms of both charge/discharge rates (kW/MW) and energy storage (kWh/MWh)
Short-term storage wants high charge and discharge rate, efficiency and durability. Longer-term storage mainly favors cheap capacity, and tolerates low charging rate and low efficiency.