According to a recent report, there was only 13.4 GWh of grid storage in the US 2022.
Even with projected growth, each addition 12 GWh is not trivial.
https://www.smart-energy.com/regional-news/north-america/us-...
Even with projected growth, each addition 12 GWh is not trivial.
https://www.smart-energy.com/regional-news/north-america/us-...
The entire industry is growing at 10x capacity every five years!
Don't forget that this single 1GW of nuclear took more than a decade.
We simply can not scale nuclear to meet our needs, it is not a technology that scales well at all.
For example, we have roughly 100GW of reactors in the US rapidly reaching their end of life. Even if the industry put all its effort in rebuilding fast enough to replace existing reactors, it would require a scale up that we can't possibly imagine right now. Meanwhile, we are already scaling storage, by building factory after factory.
Grid storage is projected only to grow 10-17 GWh per year according to the aforementioned article.
Is that anywhere enough, if the aim is to decarbonise?
If we add 10-17GWh in 2023, it would be foolish to think we will add the same amount in 2024. The amount added per year will grow too.
We are at the beginning of the logistic curve, where growth is exponential. A few years ago, there wasn't even a single GWh on the grid.
For more than a century we have balanced the grid by keeping energy stored in fuel; as we switch to cheap renewables, that's the only time that grid storage becomes necessary, and you have to get to pretty high levels of renewables before it makes economic sense to add storage. So the market is small now, and will grow. Until then, those lithium ion batteries are being shoved into cars, because car makers can not acquire them fast enough to meet demand.
There are several other very promising and quickly advancing battery technologies as well, based on iron or sodium instead of lithium. We will see which get cheap, but until there's high amounts of renewables.
According to the Woodmac report I referenced, the amount of grid storage added yearly is going down.
12 GWh in 2023 10 GWh in 2024
Based on what do you think the report is wrong and where is the exponential growth in grid storage going to come from?
I’m sure they will commission a custom report for you if you compensate them enough.
Either way, 2030 grid storage projections are highly speculative. Projections for the next five years are based on announced and planned projects. Nobody is announcing or even planning 2030 deployments yet.
Besides that, what’s your point? Are you trying to say that the previously touted exponential growth is only going to start after 2027? In 2030 perhaps?
As an aside I find it amusing that you or somebody else downvoted me for quoting a report and asking where the exponential growth that contradicts the report findings are going to come from.
Far more causal than the suggestion of building a single new GW-scale reactor, when they have just proven to have a 50% success rate on build, and come in several times over budget and behind schedule.
Until the nuclear industry shoulders the construction risk themselves, there's little chance of another utility making the decision to build a new reactor.
Given how fast reactors are getting built in the US, I'd say the batteries look like they're already doing much better than the reactors.
Of course, both can change as the number are, while interesting, small.
Do you have any reason to believe making a batteries starting with batteries will be harder than making batteries starting with rocks?
Your usage of numbers is off and extremely biased. Warranties for grid storage batteries are already longer than 10 years, and they don't suddenly stop working, they just experience finished capacity over time. Whereas 80 years for nuclear has no basis in reality, and most are getting shut down at forty due to excessive costs to continue operation.
This sort of rose-colored view of nuclear, cherry picking the very best case from one's imagination, and then taking the very worst possible estimate of the comparator, is the type of self-deception that results in nuclear losing again and again. Without a clear view of why these projects fail, and what they actually can deliver, the entire industry has lost any credibility.
I mean, those aren't the important parts in my view but yes to both. Berlin gigafactory had significant delays and the proposed expansion is on indefinite hold. Bill Gates is a large backer in Terrapower and they have a pilot plant planned in Wyoming. But I'm sure you will simply move the goal posts.
> Warranties for grid storage batteries are already longer than 10 years, and they don't suddenly stop working, they just experience finished capacity over time
I did say ten-ish, and good luck collecting on those warranties since the battery manufacturer corps are pretty ephemeral. Also, I kind of doubt operators will want to keep old batteries in their facilities since you're at increased risk for fires and those tend to be pretty dramatic in BES stations. Especially since in theory newer batteries should be better and cheaper right?
As for the 60-80 year lifetime, the Gen II plants that are worth keeping around are just now getting close to their 60 year birthdays. Most of the shut down plants in the US are gen I with small capacities, usually less than 200 MW. And the ones that aren't often fell to local and private interests that wanted them gone for other reasons. The problem with nuclear in the US is not a technical one but a socio-political one. I have no idea if the turning tide of sentiment will be able to fix these issues but I find more people are coming around fairly recently. Thank god for France, South Korea, and China.