Solar and batteries are going to win, and our thinking needs to adjust

My biggest gripe against the title of the poll "Climate or economic growth?" is the underlying assumption that economic growth comes with comfort growth. Going from oil heating to heat pumps will decrease GDP while improving comfort. Making durable fridge will decrease GDP while improving comfort, etc. Not fixing the climate will increase the GDP because of all the mitigations we'll have to implement (iirc French government estimated 15% of GDP will go to climate mitigations in 2050)

Now about the thesis of OP, even if we assume a full solar + battery world, and manage to keep that +2C, electricity pricing will swing a lot (it'll probably often go negative or at least to 0) which will lead to discomforts (people not able to pay for electricity in the winter) without state protections, even if economic growth is here. And then electricity is not enough. Simply keeping the production of autos has a considerable CO2 cost.

Not so fast. I work in large scale renewable energy. While we do invest heavily in solar and batteries, battery storage is a much riskier proposition long term than just solar generation.

No single renewable is going "to win". The only way to make renewables work is if you use every one practical in a particular market. And even then oil, gas and coal aren't going to go away because some markets and use cases just require it.

Energy is complicated. Don't buy anyone's line where they promise you the moon.

My hot take is now that most of the climate change focused people are on board with solar+battery its time to shift the story to focus on the benefits that will accrue - irrespective of climate change.

Solar+grid scale batteries could lead to true energy independence. It would provides optionality in energy sources that can provide energy pricing stability in times of crisis as well as enable lower long term negotiated prices overall.

If OPEC is opportunistically price gouging oil, solar+battery can step in. If China is opportunistically hoarding solar panels and battery raw materials, we can look to OPEC to provide a price ceiling.

I'd rather be dependent on OPEC+China and be able to play them off each other than just be solely dependent on OPEC.

For national security, US reserves should be kept in the ground as long as possible in case of true emergencies. I never got the narrative that we should be pumping it now and selling it on the open market.

Over the last 3 years, our solar panels in London generated 12MWh of electricity.

We sold 7MWh back to the grid. And we only imported 7MWh.

Basically, we're power neutral right now. A standard UK roof can easily generate an average household's electricity use across the year. Panels are likely to get cheaper and more efficient.

At current prices, solar panels pay for themselves in under 8 years.

Batteries are harder. Our 4.8kWh battery means our electricity bill for August has been practically zero. As we go into winter, we'll switch to a tariff which does cheap overnight charging so we can arbitrage on cost.

Personally, I think big batteries for communities make more sense - the current domestic ones are big, noisy, and have a far longer payback time.

For less than the subsidy of one nuclear power station, we could give every home in the UK a 5kW solar installation. (Yes, I know it isn't that simple.)

Solar has convincingly won. But the inertia of the old way of doing things will take a little time to correct.

I'm really fed up with all these articles that wave their hands at seasonal storage. Oh, we'll sort it out.

It's kinda a big problem, especially in places like, well, most of Europe, where most of your energy needs are in winter (remember the hoo-ha about Russian gas imports over winter of 2022-23?) and also where most of the sunless, and also often windless times are.

I'll be glad when solar+storage will provide cheap energy on tap, but until then waving away seasonal storage problems basically means: let's burn some stuff.

Exciting things are happening with batteries but there are multiple bottlenecks to be overcome to get to that future. This talk sounds so much like somebody in 1950 who expects fast breeder reactors to be everywhere in 1980.

“Solar PV + storage” is likely to be utility-scale storage sized at ~4h of the facility’s peak production; this lets the plant shift the load from the middle of the day when the sun is strongest to the evening where the residential power demand peaks.

There is an interesting report on this: https://emp.lbl.gov/utility-scale-solar/

It seems to me that the affordability of short-term storage is a really under-reported story. It seems to be adding $10-20 $/MWh which is not trivial but still leaves solar competitive with other sources (except perhaps gas).

It’s not clear to me that there is an obvious candidate for seasonal storage though. Anyone seen a good analysis on that? Green hydrogen is one possibility but the OpEx seems high, if you have a hydrogen plant you want to run it all the time to amortize the cost right?

For a counterpoint, see Simon Michaux's work on what full electrification entails from a resource perspective.

I have found through experience in explaining the utility grid problem to those that have little or no knowledge of the topic to start simply with a visual mathematical equation. Everyone understands basic math right?

Today we have:

Generation = Consumption

If generation fails, regardless of the reason, consumption fails as well. As some know, over consumption can cause generation failure and this is the finite juggle we read daily in the Summer from places such as TX and CA but this impact will be expanding globally year over year as electrical demand grows.

Now consider:

Generation + Storage = Consumption

Using a buffer, a computing concept applied to the energy sector, would allow for a place to debit/credit energy at will within the limits of the system regardless of consumption. In time any and all generation systems will feed into storage mechanisms which shifts the system reliability to the storage vectors away from today's generation focus. This concept is extremely big picture and I mentioned nothing about renewables as the current core electrical grid design is unsustainable. Those with their thinking cap on will realize also that the buffer is nothing more than a unit of consumption itself that is capable of returning a portion of what it held minus efficiency round trip losses.

Looking at it as math we can now apply logic as such

((Generation0 + Generation1 + GenerationN) + (Storage0 + Storage1 + StorageN)) = Consumption

As an analogous computer comparison that some here can certainly relate to, I fall back to those which have experienced the relief when a load balancer was introduced into their tech stack. Failure is definitely still possible but the core architectural design change allows to plan and compensate for that failure.

One thing is certain it will likely get worse before it gets better as there are many people talking about the problem and significantly less working toward a solution.

PS: Apologies if the format is jacked, I'm busy building.

Stay Healthy!

The debate is outdated, not because somewhere in the future would it be possible to switch to batteries and renewable energy generation if everything remains the same, but because everything won’t remain the same.

We’ve been pushing the natural variations of our climate system towards the edge of surpassing tipping points and accelerating feedback loops, and maybe with an extra push (like the present El Niño cycle) we might cross it into a path of not return.

Maybe if we restricted our energy requirements 30 years ago, pushed strongly for renewables, changed our so emitting energy sources to existing cleaner ones even at an economic loss we might not have been so close to that point and had enough time for a batteries revolution. But now it may be too little, too late already.

There are signals of acceleration in trends (I.e. https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/ ) that may change badly conditions in a few years. And emitting less is not solving, just not worsening as bad as not doing it, even if we switch to batteries by tomorrow by some magic.

I think the focus should be on seasonal storage and that isn't a fully solved problem. But there are lots of ways to do it that aren't economically competitive yet.

But maybe a few of them could easily be competitive if they just picked up some momentum for popularity?

It's weird to me that when I search for "hydrogen storage" I get a bunch of results about cars. The biggest challenge for hydrogen seems like safety, and that is a much larger concern for a vehicle in my mind. Whereas I assume you should be able to bury hydrogen tanks for seasonal energy storage and those would be relatively safe. Especially when compared to hydrogen on vehicles zipping around.

There are other possibilities for renewable seasonal energy storage. Such as biofuels from algae or maybe vegetables. Ammonia is a possibility.

Compressed biogas might help meet seasonal energy needs.

Long-term high density batteries would be great. It sounds like this is more hypothetical though at this point?

"For batteries, the constraint is mineral availability; though mining the minerals for batteries is far less environmentally destructive than mining fossil fuels, limited availability of lithium and we will probably have to switch to types of batteries that don’t use lithium in order to get enough storage for the whole world. [...] These are real challenges, but I doubt they’ll be prohibitive. [...] Meanwhile, there’s no reason to think that iron-air batteries or other types of batteries that rely on common minerals aren’t subject to the same scaling effects as lithium-ion batteries were. So I think we’ll get grid storage reasonably cheap and scalable as well."

This is just handwaving away an incredibly difficult problem that is going to be a massive choke point for batteries. Yes there is lots of ongoing research in the material science of batteries to route around the lithium bottleneck, but there is a large lead time from finding success in research to generating end products at scale. 5-15 years of being blocked here will be extremely painful/crucial.

He also purely focuses on the economics of getting solar based energy to market, eg the cost for consumers per kwh of electricity and the cost of batteries for things like EVs. But what about the added weight of these batteries? The damage done to roadways is exponentially related to the weight of the vehicles on the road, so making all cars 2x heavier means way more than 2x the road maintenance, which leads to increases in concrete and steel production. Both of which have environmental/carbon impacts of their own, and steel production especially uses an INTENSE amount of energy. And you also have the rocket problem where the bigger the battery you have to increase your range, the more of your range is being wasted by the energy required to lug the battery around.

Any serious work here has to at least look at the benefits of increased train, tram, and trolley bus networks with overhead electrification as that gives all the benefits of electrified transportation but without the downsides of batteries.

Lithium batteries also have costs involved even though they have benefits. I feel that pumped 'hydro' energy storage with dense liquids will be more sustainable for power grids in the long run.

There are also aspects of our current energy usage that cannot yet be performed by renewables, such as mass steel production and recycling of solar panels or wind turbines. R&D should be done to come up with fixes for these problems.

Many people underappreciate the value of liquid energy.

The utility of being able to put your energy in a 5 gallon container and move it anywhere you'd like doesn't compare with batteries.

You don't get to say that the debate is over until there has been a debate. You don't get to "win" by silencing the opposition.

I'm not taking sides, but I see lots of "alternative facts" from all sides (and there are more than two sides).

There's evidence that the earth is warming, but only if you squint a certain way. If you include the entire temperature record, and remove data from stations that didn't actually report data, and remove adjustments to the reported data (or alternatively remove the stations with "questionable" data recording methods), then all evidence of warming is gone.

The tidal data is also conflicted. There's no dispute that ocean levels are rising (as they have for tens of thousands of years), but the rate of the rise has not changed since pre-industrial times.

There's zero doubt that human activity is increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations, but there should be a debate (and there hasn't been one) over the point at which this becomes a problem. There are benefits to increased atmospheric CO2 such as lower diurnal temperature range (less extreme environment), increased food production, etc.

There's also the problem of getting the major contributors of the CO2 production to stop. China is at the top and has "committed" to leveling emissions at 2030 levels. Even if that happens, the whole of the remaining world could cut their emissions to zero and it would have no effect. India is number two and the same problem applies. Today now the US is committing economic suicide by eliminating energy sources and raising energy prices while the rest of the world laughs.

If you look carefully at the media reporting, you'll see that all of the climate alarm-ism comes from just a handful of extremest reporters.

If you look at the academic papers, you see a bias created by the funding sources and a reluctance of the peer-review publications to accept any skeptical works.

https://nypost.com/2023/08/09/climate-scientist-admits-the-o...

Are there battery/energy storage solutions that don't themselves require limited, non-renewable resources?

Batteries and solar panels will not save us from an economic system that requires over-production and over-consumption.

Gasoline has gravimetric density ~45MJ/kg and volumetric density ~35MJ/L. Costs about $3.80 / gallon avg or roughly $1/L.

You can store it in a cool dry place inside a metal/plastic container for decades.

Cheap, light weight, space efficient, easy to transport and convert into mechanical/electrical/heat energy.

On the other hand, lithium ion battery has gravimetric density of 0.45MJ/kg - 0.7MJ/kg and volumetric density if 0.8MJ - 0.8 - 3.6 MJ/L.

So gasoline and its hydrocarbon cousins (kerosene, diesel, vegetable fat) are 50-100X gravimetric dense and 10-100X volumetric dense compared to Li-ion batteries.

This has huuuge implications on transport - especially air travel.

Now let’s look at solar. Sun gives us about 1350 watts/m2. With clouds and conversion losses solar panels capture about 300 watts/m2.

A standard US parking lot is 9ft by 18ft. That’s 15m2.

At 4.5 hours of sunlight on average summer day, if the parking lot was covered with solar panel, it would generate 4.5MW of energy.

Suppose hypothetically we could have an an artificial tree like technology that could convert solar to gasoline like hydrocarbon, like trees capture solar + CO2 + H20 into glucose + O2.

That artificial tree solar panel would generate equivalent of 20 gallons of gasoline per month.

Avg car consumes about 40 gallons a month. So 2 parking lots would generate enough energy for 1 car.

An area the size of New Zealand / Italy / UK (roughly 300km2) if covered with solar can meet energy needs of the entire planet.

IMO the holy grail of solar will be when we crack solar -> dense hydrocarbon store and make it cheap.

It blows my mind that Trees/plants are both materials and fuel. The best form of carbon capture I know of. Wood is one of the most renewable construction materials. Trees are the ultimate natural technology that we ought to amplify.

Suppose if we could make an artificial tree that captured CO2 + solar and turned it into hydrocarbon fuel + high strength/light weight carbon-fibre-like wood, that would be the epic holy grail. Abundant high density green fuels + strong light weight building materials.

Fundamentally it is possible.

In the universe of all possible DNA, I think there exists a configuration of DNA that will yield a high efficiency carbon capture tree.

There’s also the self-assembly nature of trees. A seed grows millions of times its size into a huge tree.

Then there’s the reproducing nature of trees. A tree will produce seeds that can make more trees, which will make more seeds, which makes even more trees. One seed can turn into a forest.

Ofcourse we have to keep biodiversity in mind in an artificial forest.

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I may get downvoted for dreaming. However from laws of physics and biochemistry artificial trees should be possible.

Solar panels are non-viral non-self-assembling trees that convert to electricity.

The article is out of date, he is still talking about the Trump presidency.