I don’t think most people deny that solar is a good idea. Although isn’t it a statistic that all batteries we’ve ever manufactured would power the world for what, 15 minutes?
Is it really that much? That's incredible!
You have to realize that battery manufacturing capacity has been growing at an exponential rate. 15 minutes of global power capacity will quickly turn into 30 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, etc. 8 hours of global storage is enough to survive the night with just solar alone.
15 minutes is already a huge win. The more lead time we have for production ramping, the cheaper and more efficient we can make the plants that provide backup power.
Now on to batteries. Again, let us assume this is a manufacturing floor, and battery manufacturing continues to scale up globally.
> BNEF is tracking 7.9 TWh of annual battery manufacturing capacity announced for the end of 2025. That’s compared to demand projections of 1.6 TWh, and even that assumes steady EV demand growth and very rapid growth in batteries for storage applications. Even half that total announced capacity would be enough to equip almost every car sold in the world next year with a 50 kWh battery pack. [My note: Global light vehicle auto sales are ~90M units per year]
We are, trying to be as rational and with as little hyperbole as possible, at the hockey stick inflection point looking almost straight up.
Edit: It also appears the US is throwing another $3B into battery projects.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41603409 ("HN: US announces $3B in funding for new battery projects")
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-07-09/china-... | https://archive.today/DklaA ("Bloomberg: China’s Batteries Are Now Cheap Enough to Power Huge Shifts")
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-04-12/china-... | https://archive.is/8Dy4D ("Bloomberg: China Already Makes as Many Batteries as the Entire World Wants")
(i track and provide reporting on global energy electrification velocity and clean energy policy on a volunteer basis for a cleantech startup)
We haven’t really even ramped up production of battery chemistries that are tailor made for grid storage yet. Batteries like sodium-ion, molten metal or various flow batteries have basically no limits to how much we can scale them, and a really low potential price floor.
Batteries are being produced at TWH/year scale now. Probably crossing into 1.5-2 TWH/year this year. That's new batteries added every year. This is projected to grow over the next few years. Most of those batteries have thousands of cycles of lifetime. Tens of thousands for some of the newer chemistries (e.g. sodium ion).
Overall electricity production is 25-30 TWH per year; for the entire planet. So 25000 TWH. That's going to go up of course but it's a nice number to work with.
Those batteries can cycle multiple times per day. Lets assume once a day (they'd be able to do multiple of course). So you get about 365 TWH of power cycled per day out of 1 TWH of batteries (discharged and charged again). You'd charge them with cheap solar, wind, geothermal, and whatever else you have available; whenever you have that available.
About 70 TWH of battery would be enough to get to 25000 TWH per year. We'll have that probably in the early 2040s. Once we hit tens of TWH of battery produced per year that won't take long. Of course electricity production and demand will increase as well.
Of course, we'll have plenty of other power sources. So, most of those batteries will just be sitting there fully charged most of the time and we won't actually be cycling most of them all that much. That's a lot of potential energy. Combine that with cables, dynamic pricing, demand shaping, and a few other things and the implied need for long term storage melts away.
https://rmi.org/the-rise-of-batteries-in-six-charts-and-not-...
An online UPS will also have a AC-DC converter (rectifier) in addition to the DC-AC converter (inverter). It usually also has fans to cool those since they are running continuously, even when AC power is available.
An offline UPS is basically an online UPS with a relay, so that if the AC power is working, all of the UPS circuitry is bypassed. This reduces the usage of the DC electronics and increases the efficiency when power-loss is rare (since the AC->DC->AC path will always dissipate some power).
A line-interactive transformer is like an offline UPS, but with voltage conditioning (e.g. via an autotransformer) to handle voltages that are a bit low or a bit high.
Consumer UPSs are (almost all?) either offline or line-interactive.
https://www.amazon.com/GOLDENMATE-600W-Battery-Protector-Lif...
It's only 500VA, but it is under $1k.
Batteries have become dirt cheap to make and we are very quickly getting to the point where the power electronics are actually the more expensive part of a battery deployment rather than the battery capacity itself.
The real defining fact about solar and battery storage is that it is very amenable to mass production and scaling. Small modular components that can be produced in a factory and require minimal maintenance.
I'm in no crusade to make people think like me. I am on a path of leveraging my knowledge.