[1] https://www.emi-bg.com/en/battery-storage-in-california-has-...
Unfortunately, this probably won't work everywhere. Particularly in Northern Europe winter is tough as there's very little sunlight (manageable) and often very little wind (not manageable,as it lasts longer).
Nuclear is an expensive way of solving this problem, but it's carbon neutral which is super important.
Like, to be fair, batteries have improved so much in the last decade that this may be solved, but I'm generally sceptical of one thing that will save us, as I reckon we'll need multiple things to ensure resilience (which is really, really, really important when it comes to core needs like electricity and heating).
Maybe? Only if there are pretty large breakthroughs in storage, so we need a backup plan.
- What thresholds of $/kWh, charge speed, power density etc. do we need to reach before scaling becomes viable? What are those thresholds based on?
- Where are we now on those metrics, and how did they evolve over the last 2-3 decades?
People seem to forget that we've already been making pretty huge breakthroughs in storage for decades: https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline
Still, everyone seems very confident that scaling is non-viable now. But IMO it should be possible to demonstrate the non-viability using the approach above - even if the exact numbers are wrong, the orders of magnitude should be good enough, right?
I'm just guessing. But absent some kind of path to get there, I'd prefer to plan for needing to cover this situation with nuclear or other storage (I feel like pumped storage may make sense, but again haven't done the numbers).
Like, if you're correct then we'll end up with lots of power we don't really need. That's great, as we can use it to decarbonise other parts of the economy, however, if I'm correct and we dont build some kind of baseload/storage solution then we'll be in trouble in the winters, which I really want to avoid.
Instead of guessing, maybe it's worth looking into the numbers?