We are much more likely to solve the large scale battery problem than the fusion problem in some reasonable timeframe within our lifetimes.
Once we solve the battery problem solar and wind become enough to power humanity.
Once we solve the battery problem solar and wind become enough to power humanity.
What is significant?
Photovoltaic panels take around 1/30 of the energy they provide to build (that number is constantly going down). So if you replace all of our energy production in one go, it will take about 1 year of pollution to create them.
What is obviously a crazy idea that will never happen in practice. On the real world, the panels are produced more slowly, and are replacing the most polluting energy sources first.
(Batteries, by their turn, do not need as much energy to create.)
There is no reason for them requiring enormous amounts of energy, unless your definition of enormous is a trainload.
Virtually all of the national and global manufacturing and logistics is fossil fuel driven.
I’m not saying it shouldn’t be done but unchecked and without care our industries will take shortcuts and warp good intentions (like ethanol).
But at least in the US, we have a bad habit of outsourcing our problems away: Out sight out of mind.
If there’s any significant portion of the build out that’s non-domestic, then I have reservations.
Every single kWh that goes into making any piece of kit, whether battery, wind turbine, solar panel, e-car, or what-have-you goes onto its price tag.
How does one account for manufacturing and mining that is offshored, to ensure that they don’t use fossil fuels (like coal) in their process?
It’s the manufacturing analogue of organic food certification.
If you have any pull, feel free to liberally use this as your own :)
Just by preferring the cheaper product, you bias your choice toward being made with renewables. It is not a guarantee, but in aggregate it is good enough.
At 30c/W, even if the only activity required to make a solar panel were dumping anthracite on the ground as you mine it and setting fire to it you would still get more energy per kg of CO2 than gas.
The raw materials are sand, are copper and silver for current PV tech with trace amounts (milligrams per kw) or dopants. The amount of silver per panel is decreasing faster than the rate of panel production is increasing. Copper is mainly for wiring up and can be exchanged for aluminium if scarcity and thus cost is an issue, and inverters require substantial amounts of exotic materials (but less per capita than a phone or laptop).
A nuclear reactor requires more steel than PV requires silicon, and commensurable amounts of exotic materials.
Wind turbines require about the same amount of steel as nuclear but substantially more concrete.
If it takes more and more fossil fuel use to extract the increasingly rare components of the renewables, then renewables may not be able to save us.
I don't know if it is true, but it is a legitimate question which is worth knowing the answer to...
Wind uses copper and niobium, neither of which are essential to the concept. The copper is currently more than steam generation, but some can and is being swapped for abundant aluminium. Magnet free stators are being worked on extensively and are close to cost competitive. Steel use of the largest turbines is competitive with nuclear so iron alloying materials are a wash.
Nuclear uses zirconium, uranium, cadmium, silver, and a variety of other exotic elements as well as the copper for the steam turbines. It is difficult to find out how much, but back of the envelope (0.1% of the fuel assembly being control rod so 0.2g/GJ) would indicate it's more constrained by silver and cadmium than PV is by silver. Plus it is high level waste at end of life and you need it all up front.
The only question is whether the concrete in wind is worth the CO2 as this is the only resource where nuclear wins.
So, no, it is not any sort of legitimate question. It is, rather, concern trolling.
Lithium is about electric cars, not about renewable energy production.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-metals-autos-neodymium-an...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2022/02/06/the-f...
Rude pedantic ill-tempered dismissals of conversation as "carping" discredit a good cause more than a thousand fusion startups do. Perhaps if you want to win hearts and minds, engaging in both education and a little empathy would do wonders for your position. And to the betterment of the discourse hereabouts.
There are numerous battery chemistries. None competing for utility-scale use involve any rare materials or substantial carbon emission. Likely chemistries include iron/air, zinc/bromine, and manganese/calcium.
And the overwhelming majority of utility storage built will not be "batteries" at all. Compressed air, liquified air, synthetic ammonia, electrolysed hydrogen, pumped hydro, and buoyancy will probably all be used in various places. Just now, almost all is pumped hydro.
Most future storage will be constructed after the majority of energy produced is from renewable sources.
Why do we act as if it was just a matter of time ? It might not be solvable, or economically solvable
Pumped hydro and caes is scalable at lower prices than fission could achieve. DT fusion will be much lower power density with much more exotic materials and much higher maintenance burden.
It's just that renewables have to live in the real world where customers aren't strongarmed into paying $200/MWh for 50 years to pay for them to do whatever they want. As such work needs to be done to make solar/wind+storage economically dominate gas because governments are not powerful enough to make fossil fuels pay for their externalities.
Energy storage is a simple matter of civil engineering: a big job to construct enough, but requiring no new technology.
We are not building it now because it would be stupid to build storage there is no renewable capacity to charge up from. Money is overwhelmingly better spent today on renewable generating capacity.
By the time we need to build storage, it will be much cheaper than if built today.
Solar power is very cheap, but a complete 24/7 solution requires batteries. Those are much more expensive than the panels. A better battery is all we need. Panels are good enough already.
Large-scale storage will be very cheap, on par with panels. It really is just civil engineering. Any competent civil engineer can sketch a practical, cheap storage system using only century-old tech.
Hand-wringing over utility-scale storage amounts to concern trolling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed-air_energy_storage
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal%E2%80%93air_electrochemi...
For long duration storage: hydrogen, ammonia.
Also: why must the highly variable renewables share the grid with highly variable demand, use them to make hydrogen (only when the sun is shining/wind is blowing), feed that into a totally separate power plant, simple to manage - if renewables really get cheap who cares if it's inefficient.