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.
We need grid-scale energy storage.
Right now we have about 30 GW worth of it on a grid with 1200 GW of generative capacity.
Until that changes, every solar and wind installation is going to come paired with a gas peaker plant.
The future isn't solar/wind + batteries, at least not much beyond the point where the overbuild requirements are such that one is building more and more generation and storage to compensate for smaller and smaller windows of time. Which for most places is probably around the point where the total solar and wind capacity is roughly equal to the peak production average times a small multiple less than 2.
I always point at texas, and which is again in the news, because they are discovering that solar quits about two hours before the peak demand falloff, and they are literally paying people not to consume power. And this is only really a problem because no one wants to invest in NG plants that sit idle most of the time, and the wind generation has dropped down to 20% or so of its nameplate installed capacity over the past couple weeks. Leaving literally nothing to make up the shortfall. So there is going to be a huge rush to install enough batteries to make up that 2 hour window for 1/2 the year, then it will stop because its not economical to have them providing power outside of that window.
If they run just a couple of days a year, they could be fueled with green hydrogen with little effect on the overall cost of the system. Fossil fuels are not needed here.
Texas doing its own thing is, sadly, evidence against my personal favourite solution: a global power grid would, from a pure engineering perspective, be totally viable, and would mean you don't need any storage for stationary use — sun always shines somewhere on the planet, an a square metre cross section of aluminium is close to just one Ohm per 40,000 km, and that's only a few year's global aluminium for something that would easily last a century.
Unfortunately, Texas isn't even willing to join up with New Mexico, so this is unlikely to come to pass.
The wildly misleading number is about what China spends on coal in a couple of years: a few hundred billion.
Also, at 40,000 km you don't need two — that's all the way around the planet and back to the start.
Heat loss obviously depends on current and voltage choices; reasonable numbers say this still works out fine, given how much cheaper PV is compared to both storage and other production.
However, despite all that: if we can't even take baby steps like convincing Texas to play nice with their neighbouring states, something like this is only plausible on planets with a single world government, not Earth.
> Until that changes, every solar and wind installation is going to come paired with a gas peaker plant.
Sure; and as the necessary gas plants are mostly already all there, we can start by doing nothing, before gradually just switching them off as we build out the storage.
(The storage doesn't have to be batteries: gravity storage is cheap; disappointingly, hydrogen electrolysis doesn't exist in meaningful quantities yet, but it is no more mysterious magic than batteries; and there are more besides).
Only way to be sure we don't get them is to invent something better.
I do like the aesthetics of hydroelectric dams: they also need concrete, though proportionally less.
I think some people are working on eco-friendly cements that would make for eco-friendly concrete; we certainly need that too, regardless of how we solve power production.
We need some grid-scale energy storage. But having distributed storage is a welcome element as well, it makes the grid far more stable and reduces the impact of peak production times as well as the day/night cycle.
Anyway, on a planetary scale energy is more of an engineering challenge than a serious problem, the issues all stem from the hundreds of local fiefdoms that all vie for control of a slice of the pie.
The talk is about how the path is clear, so we should start to look at those bottlenecks and remove them. But well, the path has been patently clear for more than a decade. It was only propaganda trying to obscure it.
Whoever manages to abandon doomerism and walk the path, instead of resisting being dragged through it will get the first mover advantage over well, the entire future.
I read a lot of literature on the energy situation 20 years ago because I got concerned about this long before a lot of other people did and the assumption back then was that we needed at least 10x the energy storage than many people seem to think we need now. Newer literature doesn't confront the old literature and explain why it's different today, it just seems that people are more optimistic.
Sure batteries are around in the world but at 100x the cost and 1/100 times the scale. Could an exponential curve continue, yes it could. But "things that can't continue forever won't" and we are seeing that happen in the semiconductor industry right now where new generations of chips are not cheaper per transistor than old chips which will bring progress to an absolute halt.
What I see is a lot of quoting very low prices that are a bird in the bush not a bird in the hand and no mention of error bars or "the probability of this is 70%" or, more likely, "there are four events that have to happen to realize this that each have a 50% probability of occurring" so the result is that people react like they do when they get assaulted by a friend (soon to be ex-friend) who wants them to join Amway or by a crypto bro at a party. That is, people like Noah have to sound a bit less optimistic if they want to be taken seriously.
That exactly what people were saying about solar 10 years ago. Hell, some people are still saying that about solar today, but it's what people were correctly saying 10 years ago.
Do you have any reason for why batteries will stop improving before they are mainstream? (As somebody pointed out, your numbers are a bit off, and they are already viable. They just aren't the cheapest option in isolation, so we have natural gas plants and batteries are niche. Do you have a good reason why they will stop improving before they dethrone natural gas?)
Because, just like solar, the physical constraints puts a floor on their price that is much lower than what we need.
In a lot of cases you get a few miracles then you run out of miracles. Like aviation. That's the normal case in technology in fact, cases like semiconductors where the miracles keep coming are really unusual.
Let's just forget that people had a pretty good idea on how far one could push the semiconductors industry since a few years after the transistor was invented. Let's not look at the physical possibilities at all, because in what way could that help?
I really think you are trying to say that people will have to work hard to gain the battery improvements. But, yeah, of course they will. Nobody on the entire thread said those gains will be free. What I simply don't understand is why you insist the process of optimizing batteries will stop orders of magnitude away from the optimum, without any reasoning behind it.
Batteries are available today. Whether they are the right choice for you is mostly dependent on the kind of power hookup that you have (assuming an on-grid system), local certification requirements and available space (and of course funds).
https://www.teslarati.com/370-tesla-megapack-batteries-lathr...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvSmMUdC_nA
> Tesla noted in its Q2 2023 Update Later that energy storage deployments are increasing, thanks in no small part to the Lathrop Megafactory’s ramp. The facility, after all, is still in its early stages, considering that it has a target output of 10,000 Megapack batteries annually.
> “Energy storage deployments increased by 222% YoY in Q2 to 3.7 GWh, another strong quarter due to the ongoing ramp of our first dedicated Megapack factory (Megafactory) in Lathrop, CA. The ramp of this 40 GWh Megafactory – the first of many – has been successful with still more room to reach full capacity,” Tesla noted in its Q2 2023 Update Letter.
(next two years of production is already committed to customers, demand is overwhelming)
https://www.globenewswire.com/en/news-release/2023/04/27/265... (The global stationary energy storage market is estimated to reach over USD 215.34 billion by 2031, exhibiting a CAGR of 22.19% during the forecast period.)