TLDR: We don't have enough minerals (including reserves) to completely switch our energy from ff to renewables, assuming our current energy consumption flatline, and our renewable technology efficiency and mineral consumption remain the same.
I find his work not so credible. He seems to assume LFP does not exist as a viable alternative for nickel/cobolt requiring chemistries. and He's also missing that the lithium reserves keep on increasing on a rapid pace. (I refer to his work a couple of years ago, if he has something brand new, I don't know about that.)
Based on his calculations from a video a year ago. He projects that we would need 940M tons of lithium, while 2022 reported reserves is 95M tons.[0]
Are we going realistically find enough undiscovered lithium reserves that is the same size as our known reserves as of 2022, even assuming that he is off by a factor of 4?
I was referring his claims about electrification of glo al car fleet. Now that you mention, he had also some claims about lithium needs for replacing all fossil production with lithium batteries, baut also there the assumptions were not so realistic if I recall correctly. If you want to quote him, I would recommend going through his assumptions very carefully.
95M tons is nickel, he says there's 22M tons of lithium. That's actually the 2021 number, 2022 is 26M tons, which is double the known reserves in 2010: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1253739/lithium-reserves.... Of course this can't go on forever, but there's no reason to think growth will suddenly stop in the next few years. The very recent explosion in demand for lithium incentivizes search for more reserves. If we really can't find any more, then billions or trillions of dollars will be redirected to bring lithium extraction from seawater to commercial scale.
>If we really can't find any more, then billions or trillions of dollars will be redirected to bring lithium extraction from seawater to commercial scale.
And we are probably going to burn fossil fuel to obtain the energy for this?
No probably not, since solar is already the cheapest option for new generation and lithium extraction is an ideal application for intermittent power, I would expect these operations to be primarily powered by renewables. That's just thinking about the economics, but obviously there will also be very strong cultural and legal pressure to minimize emissions as well.
You can look at recently-proposed remote green hydrogen facilities as inspiration. Similar to hydrogen, since you don't need to worry about connecting to the grid, you can build solar and wind generators pretty much anywhere that has a ton of sun and wind, extract the lithium onsite, and then ship it to where it's needed.
This is a common issue with any material reserves. You will hear people say that we don't have enough uranium reserves to have more nuclear power, or more lithium reserves for batteries, etc. People also used to say that about oil (remember "peak oil"?) but not anymore.
The thing is, there's always only certain amount of known reserves.
When there's not enough known reserves of something, the price will go up, and it is pretty lucrative to look for more, or even come up with new ways of getting that thing (see fracking).
When there's too much known reserves, the price will go down, and it might not be worth it to look for more, because not only you won't get as much money, but the people who currently own reserves will lose money as the price goes further down (for similar example, see landlords being NIMBYS because new housing lowers their property).
So yes, we do have 50 years of known reserves of Uranium on current consumption. But we also had 50 years or known reservers of it thirty years ago. Known reserves of stuff tend to keep around that number.
That of course does not mean that there is literally unlimited amount of minerals in Earth's crust - but we do have enough of stuff for quite a while, Earth is a pretty big planet.
Edit: that said I'm myself not convinced by "solar + grid scale batteries" strategy, I would rather see nuclear power and keep the batteries for cars.
With peak oil, there was also misunderstanding by a lot of people on the difference between reserves (and what proven/probable/possible actually mean) and resource.
The uranium argument is about resources, not proven reserves. Power the world with LWRs and the estimated uranium resource runs out in about five years.
Do you have any links? I found a ton of publications from this guy but none on the particular topic you mentioned.
I also won't necessarily call that a counterpoint, it's just a related issue. It can be true that both a) replacing existing electrical capacity with renewables will be easier and cheaper than we thought in the past, and b) scaling up the grid to account for increased electrification in buildings and vehicles will still be very hard.
I found this unconvincing, a little like saying there isn't enough coal in Wales to power everything if all global shipping switched over to steam engines. When there's demand for a resource that wasn't there before, there tends to be new discoveries of it, new ways of mining it, and new geographical territories of interest. Similarly, sometimes the resource is replaced by a completely different substitute - we power our cars with gasoline and internal combustion engines, not coal and steam engines like we used for early locomotives. There's already promising developments for extracting lithium from seawater, where there's more than enough for every person on earth to have multiple tons of it:
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.
Why do you think an electric heat pump will increase comfort over oil heating? It's not that I think heat pumps are bad, I just didn't know there was a claim of any improvements beyond efficiency / environmental benefits.
Note that this isn't true for all heat pumps, nor all furnaces. A forced-air system can vary the air handler speed, and a hydronic system can vary the water temperature; with heat pumps, there exist variable-speed compressors, but there also exist single-speed compressors.
If there is no other difference besides they use less energy to produce the same amount of heating, then you have extra money, and extra money can buy lots of comforts. Why does the comfort have do come directly from the pump?
Electricity in California is 36 cents or more per kw. Maybe it makes sense in states paying 6 to 15 cents, but I assume I'll end up paying more if forced to switch to heat pumps.
California is moving towards a system which would introduce a monthly fixed cost based on your income, while simultaneously decreasing the cost of electricity per kWh (see: AB 205). Heat pumps become more attractive after such a change.
My claim wasn't that an Income Graduated Fixed Charge would make your electric bill go down from what it currently is -- it could very well go up.
My claim is that, assuming an IGFC is implemented and the marginal cost of electricity goes down considerably, then a heat pump becomes cheaper to operate. You'll be paying the same fixed cost to be connected to the grid, whether you have a gas furnace or an electric heat pump. It might just be that the newly-lowered electric rates finally make a heat pump more cost-effective than a gas furnace.
Wait, so once they set your rate you can use as much electricity as you want and still pay the same rate?? That's insane. Crypto miners and EV drivers rejoice.
Not quite. Right now, (most) California residential electric bills are entirely volumetric, meaning that you pay for what you use — if you use zero, you pay (close to) zero. Under the new system, everyone’s bill will instead have a sizable fixed component (determined by household income) for being connected to the grid, and a volumetric component (determined by the amount that you use). The new price per kilowatt hour will be smaller than the existing rates.
Energy cost has long been viewed as a means to constrain consumption. This new approach seems to undermine that approach given the reduced cost per volume.
If I'm paying entirely based on volume, then making my home twice as efficient makes my bill half as much. But under this new system, I wouldn't realize the same savings.
Seems like a policy set with priorities other then environmental protections.
> Seems like a policy set with priorities other then environmental protections.
There are definitely other non-environmental considerations at play, the largest being that the increasing number of home solar installations has reduced revenue streams for utility companies, while at the same time their costs have increased due to grid maintenance and wildfire prevention projects (and lawsuit payouts). Most houses with solar are still heavy users of the grid, yet they pay very little towards its upkeep. This pushes the costs onto people without solar, who tend to be renters or low income households.
> Energy cost has long been viewed as a means to constrain consumption. This new approach seems to undermine that approach given the reduced cost per volume.
The idea that electricity consumption must be constrained makes sense when the electricity is generated by fossil fuels -- replacing a gas furnace with an electric heat pump when the electricity is made by burning coal is not a big improvement. But we're entering a world where most of the electricity is generated by clean solar, and constraining usage doesn't reduce emissions quite as much. In this world, a heat pump powered by solar is a real improvement over a gas furnace, environmentally-speaking. But a heat pump only beats a gas furnace in terms of cost to operate if the price of electricity comes down relative to the price of gas.
From that perspective, removing constraints on electricity usage is not a bug, but a feature.
The history of why you guys overpay so much is fascinating. Its a tail of good intentions causing bad unintended consequences. The path to hell is certainly paved with good intention.
Much better than heat pumps: good thermal insulation, central air snd a heat exchanger. This solved the root of the problem, heat being transferred. For the little that‘s left over, depending on climate, you can add a small heat pump that’s mostly shut off.
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.
I disagree, the whole point of this article is that the "fast breeder reactors" in your analogy are already here and widely deployed. We don't need any new technology and we don't need it to get cheaper, although it probably will. It's a description of the current world, not a prediction of the future.
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.
Right, we need grid-scale storage, and as you say we already have some deployed. So the challenge now is to deploy a lot more, which is certainly a big challenge, but we don't need to invent any new technology.
And even then, unless your willing to admit to rolling blackouts and grid failures on a fairly regular basis someone will have to build NG plants, even if they only run a couple days a year.
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.
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.
I calculated raw material cost at current pricing, which is both the best I can do and also wildly misleading — the scale is large enough to influence prices, as it either leads to new aluminium production (which means that when it is finished there is probably oversupply and thus lower cost aluminium on the world market) or it competes with existing demand while being built (driving up prices).
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.
> And even then, unless your willing to admit to rolling blackouts and grid failures on a fairly regular basis someone will have to build NG plants, even if they only run a couple days a year.
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.
> 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.
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).
Sadly, I recently learned, gravity storage takes up massive amounts of space (nature?) because you need insane amounts of mass for storing relatively tiny amounts of energy. It usually has 50 per cent loss.
Indeed. I certainly hope that we don't get lots of those cranes lifting and lowering concrete blocks: we might, because they appear to be really cheap; but we shouldn't, because of how much CO2 is produced by making concrete.
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.
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.
Boosterism is the close partner of doomerism. If I were facing a bunch of boosters I'd probably sound a lot like Noah in comparison to how I sound now.
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 general you need some miracle to get a factor of X, for instance progress in semiconductors has required a few miracles a decade. For a long time we got those miracles until we didn't. (It's not an accident that people are complaining that this year's GPUs aren't cheaper than last year's GPUs because transistors are not longer getting cheaper with die shrinks which is the real end of "Moore's law")
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.
Telsa is pumping them out. All stationary storage that isn't a boondoggle is welcome of course (looking at you concrete blocks on towers), just ramp, that's it. Make cells, package cells, ship packaged storage system to site, commission, operate. Easy peasy.
> 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)
There is a giant difference between nuclear tech of the 1950s and Solar+batteries of today. The scale of deployment, the engineering challenges and the degree of planning required are all massively different, as well as the biggest factor: the base cost of an installation per KWh produced. You can effectively call up a solar installer and buy the parts tomorrow morning and you could have a working setup somewhere mid next week if it is your first time.
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).
Cool but if Trump is the Republican nominee on Election Day 2024 your choice will be Biden at almost 82 and Trump at 78. Sounds like geriocracy will be your only choice.
Well, the Republicans can solve that at one stroke and win the election: nominate Trump as running mate of whoever wins the primaries that isn't 80+.
Of course that would still create all kinds of potential for trouble but it would almost certainly win them the elections. But maybe I shouldn't be giving them any idea. Otoh Trump will almost certainly not want to play second fiddle to anybody. But it would be one way to get pardoned.
Fusion (particularly DT fusion) is grossly overvalued as an energy source. It's been an element of the consensus futurology (which is why you see it as a trope in SF stories), but this placement is not deserved by its actual qualities.
Renewables make much more sense. At the experience curve for utility scale PV from 2010 to 2022, assuming that experience rate of 33.1% decline per doubling of cumulative deployment would continue, if the world were powered by PV the levelized cost of delivered power would fall to $0.003/kWh.
Exactly the "too cheap to meter" claims that were made about fission energy.
The problem is that though the marginal cost of the next watt-hour of electricity may be low you still have to pay the very real (and likely huge) costs of constructing and maintaining the reactors and generating plant. Investors will need to earn a return; the bonds payments will need to be made.
Not forever, but they're enough to save us from specifically the energy part of the problem, for the next 45 years even at PV growth rates, or for 390 years if it reduces to only 3% annual compound growth.
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.
Every single word of that is bullshit. 100% lies paid for by oil companies. And at this point the evidence is so clear and overwhelming that there is no reason to believes anyone argues this bullshit in good faith.
Summers are getting longer and hotter, glaciers and arctic ice are receding at record speeds, those are undeniable facts that everyone can see that with their own eyes.
So fuck right off with your Rupert-Murdoch-provided lies.
If your goal is to help the environment, then stop this. You're accomplishing the opposite by pushing people like this away from your cause.
Before you say "I don't need people like him on my side"; think about whether that's actually true. Do you need _the majority_ of the world on board for the _global_ issue? Donald Trump as president of the U.S.A. is what happens with this kind of attitude.
If your goal is to be angry and self-righteous though, good job.
> There's evidence that the earth is warming, but only if you squint a certain way.
Get real. I used to sympathize with global warming deniers. It's 2023. The debate has been had for 40 years and now things are literally catching fire. There is not room for debate anymore.
Not agreeing with the parent comment but if half the country still wants to debate this issue then it seems like it is too political. Climate change has been one of the democrats top issues for decades. Is there any climate change could not be a political issue?
I wish but unlikely. Debate in the general public doesn't convince people who've been fed misinformation for decades. People who are still getting this misinformation daily.
Fox was exposed as a liar in court documents. Yet people still cite them as "truthful" vs. sources like CNN (who to be fair, aren't great).
The problem is in lobbying and politicians. This would have no impact if politicians had a slight bit of a spine. They know the facts well and just don't care. The natural disasters that are hitting people in the face might solve this problem. Politicians are finally coming face to face with the results of their actions.
Agreed that you have to squint a certain way. Specifically to see the very small part of the timeline over human history which is relevant. The period where the rate of change in global temperatures has been significantly altered is very small when zooming out. That certainly doesn't mean it's not real.
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.
Why would oil refineries do that? Unless they are all acting as a cartel to fix prices, it would be obvious that some are more expensive than others for no reason. Price fixing doesn't work with price competition.
If they are acting as a cartel and coordinating among every refinery, how do you keep that hidden? You can't and the reward isn't worth being screwed by antitrust and all other backlash when you get caught.
Obviously petrochemical refineries are going set prices to maximize profits. They don't need any excuse to do that.
In the US, existing refineries have significant pricing power because environmental laws have made it nearly impossible to build new ones. The issue is compounded in California by idiotic state laws that mandate a unique blend of gasoline only produced by a handful of refineries. This ends up being effectively a direct wealth transfer from consumers to refinery owners without even achieving any significant environment benefits.
The argument kind of falls apart considering we already do that. The Strategic Petroleum Reserves diverts oil drilled and refined using vulnerable infrastructure that could take decades to setup into deep salt caverns that can be filled and drained near instantly. Expanding our reserves would just involve more drilling so we can fill more random mines and caverns.
The nuance is that the SPR only diverts a small fraction of the oil drilled annually. The majority as I understand it is used for immediate US consumption.
Grid scale batteries are still aways out and still have to prove themselves at scale but a promising one is made out of materials that are sourced universally - such as iron. [1]
If lithium is battery substrate of choice then the actual raw materials suppliers are more numerous and are not highly correlated to OPEC members. So you get relative energy independence. As far as I know there is not any sort of lithium cartel that has formed as of yet.
Additionally as I understand it - since for grid scale, density is not a factor - there is not as strong a need for rare earth metals. [2]
From my perspective at least, I lump in US oil producers as part of OPEC and less as part of the US.
Due to the transportability of oil and the existence of a spot oil market, in times of high global/US oil demand, the US oil producers will sell out to the highest bidder and export our oil and basically take the profits at the expense of US energy users. [1]
Oil/LNG prices are a global market whereas solar+battery is a regional market unless grids are set up.
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.
> It is important to be aware that different regions in the UK have different sun hours per day: England has 4.1, Scotland has 3.7, Northern Ireland 3.2 and Wales 3.3.
> At current prices, solar panels pay for themselves in under 8 years.
and from the article
> the discussions seem stuck back in 2010, when solar power and electric vehicles were prohibitively expensive
It's an inconvenient truth that most people can not afford to pay €20-40k for something now, that will save them money in 8 years (and then, slowly). As the saying goes "it's too expensive to be poor" — except we're all "middle-class" now, apparently.
A typical solar array and installation is anywhere from £4k - £12k (a bit more if you want a battery etc).
I agree that we should be subsidising the installation. And, indeed, lots of councils do group-buying schemes which do that. And there are semi-reasonable financing schemes available.
That's what financing is for, although its availability is dependent on what a bank can recover if you stop paying -- e.g. they can take back your car or repossess your house.
Installation costs can't be recovered, but a battery can certainly be repossessed. Unmounting solar panels is probably much more work, so I don't know. Or just add it to your home's existing mortgage, since then it's just repossessing the house with solar+battery included.
But the point is that, if the down payment is made small enough, the desired result is that you start saving money immediately, because your monthly financing payment is less than what you're saving on your electric bill.
Of course, ideally there's some kind of government subsidy here that makes it a no-brainer for banks, where the government pays the interest or down payment or something.
There are schemes in the UK which will allow you to add these costs to your energy bill (repaid over time with interest). This seems to me like the "best" solution - it puts the costs and benefits together, stays with the house and the bad debt risk is significantly mitigated without needing to worry about enforcing security over a physical asset. Not sure why it's not better known or widespread.
Loans exist, especially for people who own houses. When I had solar panels installed ten years ago, I put nothing down and started saving money immediately. The system cost about $14K and paid for itself before the seven-year mark.
I think the big thing that happened in the last few years is containerized utility battery systems are now a win purely based on balance sheet accounting.
The logistics are really good. You can manufacture them in a factory. Ship them as a normal container. Drop them where they can be conveniently connected to the grid. And that's it.
> As we go into winter, we'll switch to a tariff which does cheap overnight charging so we can arbitrage on cost.
"As we go into winter, we will leverage the super cheap battery poor folks are forced to pay to exist for us when it's convenient".
It's very hard to take these arguments seriously when that is really what is happening - relatively well off folks using the commons to subsidize themselves whilst patting themselves on the back about it.
Yes, it's a quite trivial problem when you get to outsource the hard bit of it and only have to pay for the low hanging profitable fruit.
Until your community battery gets into the weeks to month in storage capacity, these anecdotes really read disingenuous to me. Seasonal storage is the hard nut to crack, and we haven't even solved overnight storage for most places.
I've been spec'ing out truly off-grid designs lately, and it's an order of magnitude difference if you want to not use the public subsidy of your neighbors paying for it for you.
How does that work in the winter in England? You'd think such a climate wouldn't work well with solar except in the summer, and not summer is most of the year. I assume you're using gas or other sources for heating?
A 2 kWh battery with integrated inverter is far cleaner, more convenient and quieter than carrying around a gallon of gasoline and a generator. 5 gallons of gas and a similarly sized generator is big enough that you want a vehicle to move it around. And since you're using a vehicle, and since in the future most of those will be electric with V2L, the 5 gallons of gas & generator are thus superfluous.
People are doing exactly that with batteries these days though. Go look at youtube channels where people are building a cabin, traveling in a van/RV, etc.
I'm seeing lots of videos with a portable "5 gallon container" sized batteries that people are moving around.
Even better, since you can attach some solar panels and not have to go refill the container, unlike gas/diesel containers.
This isn't to say batteries/solar are perfect for this. But, they are certainly providing enough pros vs liquid fuels that tons of people are widely using them in place of gasoline/diesel/kerosene.
Personally, if I never have to hear a damn generator running all frigging day/night while at a campsite, the cost to switch to batteries/solar will have been entirely worthwhile.
On the other hand, the energy density difference is astonishing and this is where hydrocarbons are pretty unbeatable. 1 US gallon of diesel has more than 35 kWh of energy in it (and we can get more than 40% of that out of it with modern efficient engines) and weighs approximately 3.5kg.
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.
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.
"Season battery storage" sounds very wrong to me. Maybe he is talking about some kind of flow battery where you can just add more tanks of electrolyte. But we don't have that yet.
Extremely unlikely because it doesn't align with the financial incentives of the power companies to improve infra to support mass V2G when those batteries are not guaranteed to be available in the first place
A recent episode[0] of the catalyst podcast makes a pretty convincing argument that in aggregate, car behavior is so predictable that V2X could be a valuable asset.
The problem is getting people to actually agree to plug in their car and let the power company run it. That's a huge ask to get people to agree to, it's going to take serious compensation that power companies won't want to do.
Why not? Where I live, consumers already get compensated ca €0,08 per kWh generated by their solar panels. At peak times, where spot prices are sometimes €0,3 or more, they could pay extra for people who want to provide power from batteries.
One issue with this is that at we have peaks in demand for electricity exactly when cars are more likely to be on the roads (morning and evening commute times, roughly).
So for it to happen at large scale, we would need to see significant reductions in eg night time generation capacity. In my view this is unlikely (nuclear and wind will still run at night even if we close every coal, oil and gas fired generator).
From my view: Uncertain. It's currently more of a "we would like to explore X" rather than a "we will depend on X". It's actually simpler to just pay for and build the more industrial scale battery installations, even considering the difficulties of financing, real estate, construction, regulations, etc. But I just work for one big company, maybe someone else is taking it much more seriously.
Personally I'm still not sure how the hell all the apartments and cities in the world are going to both install enough chargers and solve subscription charging when almost all the charger companies have absolute dogshit hardware on 3+ year old obsolete charging standards. Their software is so bad I can't believe someone was paid to write it. So, yeah, V2G? Let's get reliable managed chargers everywhere first and then think about the grid
> I get a little of this feeling when I watch Americans argue about climate change; the discussions seem stuck back in 2010
This article itself feels like a throwback to 2010. He acts like solar + batteries solves the entire problem. It doesn't. In fact, it barely scratches the surface. We have much larger needs such as industrial, heavy transportation, agriculture, etc. Writing an outdated article about the rapidly dropping price of solar power while handwaving all other problems doesn't solve the problem. The author is basically just now catching up to 2010. He is in reality still stuck in 2010 despite what he thinks.
"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.
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.
And also that this combination of generation+storage must be reasonably priced. That is at least somewhat competitive. Which for storage part is still quite suspect.
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 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
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.
Your formula for today is missing a term. We already have storage (buffer capacity). It is mainly stored natural gas used to fuel gas turbine peaker plants that can spin up in a matter of minutes to handle surges in consumption.
“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.
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?
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.
Because historically we do not have technology complex enough to need specific minerals. Now we do.
> Most of these needs we can fulfill with many different minerals. And the amount of all [1] minerals in earths crust is staggering compared to any foreseeable futre, so we are just going to flip to whatever is easiest/cheapest to dig.
There is another factor at play though: energy required to extract the minerals. Ones deeper in the earth's crust are likely more energy intensive to extract and perhaps even purify. At some point it won't be worth it.
> None will "run out" as in there is no more available, only that the remaining ones are too expensive to extract at the moment.
Right, the issue is cost of extraction (in materials, energy, and externalities, the only real currencies), not exhaustion of the reserves. I think Simon would argue 1) that the degree to which the current economy depends on fossil resources (e.g. for metal-working; how do we reach the required temperatures without melting an electrically-powered heating element?) has not been grasped by policy-makers or the public, and 2) that we are already in energy decline, exacerbated by ongoing failure of ecosystem services. In other words, he thinks we have bled too much momentum and triggered too many blowbacks to "level off" at current living standards, if that were even a viable path forward (given the rate at which we are destroying the biological basis for human life, it is not).
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 229 ms ] threadLong video, but informative.
TLDR: We don't have enough minerals (including reserves) to completely switch our energy from ff to renewables, assuming our current energy consumption flatline, and our renewable technology efficiency and mineral consumption remain the same.
Are we going realistically find enough undiscovered lithium reserves that is the same size as our known reserves as of 2022, even assuming that he is off by a factor of 4?
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBVmnKuBocc&t=2604s
https://www.theengineer.co.uk/content/news/kaust-spinout-wil...
We have not run out of any mineral ever and I don't believe we ever will.
Is mineral not a finite resource? I don't understand your source of optimism here.
And we are probably going to burn fossil fuel to obtain the energy for this?
You can look at recently-proposed remote green hydrogen facilities as inspiration. Similar to hydrogen, since you don't need to worry about connecting to the grid, you can build solar and wind generators pretty much anywhere that has a ton of sun and wind, extract the lithium onsite, and then ship it to where it's needed.
The thing is, there's always only certain amount of known reserves.
When there's not enough known reserves of something, the price will go up, and it is pretty lucrative to look for more, or even come up with new ways of getting that thing (see fracking).
When there's too much known reserves, the price will go down, and it might not be worth it to look for more, because not only you won't get as much money, but the people who currently own reserves will lose money as the price goes further down (for similar example, see landlords being NIMBYS because new housing lowers their property).
So yes, we do have 50 years of known reserves of Uranium on current consumption. But we also had 50 years or known reservers of it thirty years ago. Known reserves of stuff tend to keep around that number.
That of course does not mean that there is literally unlimited amount of minerals in Earth's crust - but we do have enough of stuff for quite a while, Earth is a pretty big planet.
Edit: that said I'm myself not convinced by "solar + grid scale batteries" strategy, I would rather see nuclear power and keep the batteries for cars.
I also won't necessarily call that a counterpoint, it's just a related issue. It can be true that both a) replacing existing electrical capacity with renewables will be easier and cheaper than we thought in the past, and b) scaling up the grid to account for increased electrification in buildings and vehicles will still be very hard.
https://tupa.gtk.fi/raportti/arkisto/42_2021.pdf
Shorter 72 page one focused on mining resources
https://tupa.gtk.fi/raportti/arkisto/16_2021.pdf
Policy/math is based on older modelling that used greener European factories in early 2000's that are now replaced by Chinese.
https://www.gtk.fi/en/research/time-to-wake-up/
I found this unconvincing, a little like saying there isn't enough coal in Wales to power everything if all global shipping switched over to steam engines. When there's demand for a resource that wasn't there before, there tends to be new discoveries of it, new ways of mining it, and new geographical territories of interest. Similarly, sometimes the resource is replaced by a completely different substitute - we power our cars with gasoline and internal combustion engines, not coal and steam engines like we used for early locomotives. There's already promising developments for extracting lithium from seawater, where there's more than enough for every person on earth to have multiple tons of it:
https://www.science.org/content/article/seawater-could-provi...
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.
My claim is that, assuming an IGFC is implemented and the marginal cost of electricity goes down considerably, then a heat pump becomes cheaper to operate. You'll be paying the same fixed cost to be connected to the grid, whether you have a gas furnace or an electric heat pump. It might just be that the newly-lowered electric rates finally make a heat pump more cost-effective than a gas furnace.
If I'm paying entirely based on volume, then making my home twice as efficient makes my bill half as much. But under this new system, I wouldn't realize the same savings.
Seems like a policy set with priorities other then environmental protections.
There are definitely other non-environmental considerations at play, the largest being that the increasing number of home solar installations has reduced revenue streams for utility companies, while at the same time their costs have increased due to grid maintenance and wildfire prevention projects (and lawsuit payouts). Most houses with solar are still heavy users of the grid, yet they pay very little towards its upkeep. This pushes the costs onto people without solar, who tend to be renters or low income households.
> Energy cost has long been viewed as a means to constrain consumption. This new approach seems to undermine that approach given the reduced cost per volume.
The idea that electricity consumption must be constrained makes sense when the electricity is generated by fossil fuels -- replacing a gas furnace with an electric heat pump when the electricity is made by burning coal is not a big improvement. But we're entering a world where most of the electricity is generated by clean solar, and constraining usage doesn't reduce emissions quite as much. In this world, a heat pump powered by solar is a real improvement over a gas furnace, environmentally-speaking. But a heat pump only beats a gas furnace in terms of cost to operate if the price of electricity comes down relative to the price of gas.
From that perspective, removing constraints on electricity usage is not a bug, but a feature.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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).
https://www.wired.com/story/energy-vault-gravity-storage/
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.
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.
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.)
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).
Of course that would still create all kinds of potential for trouble but it would almost certainly win them the elections. But maybe I shouldn't be giving them any idea. Otoh Trump will almost certainly not want to play second fiddle to anybody. But it would be one way to get pardoned.
Renewables make much more sense. At the experience curve for utility scale PV from 2010 to 2022, assuming that experience rate of 33.1% decline per doubling of cumulative deployment would continue, if the world were powered by PV the levelized cost of delivered power would fall to $0.003/kWh.
The problem is that though the marginal cost of the next watt-hour of electricity may be low you still have to pay the very real (and likely huge) costs of constructing and maintaining the reactors and generating plant. Investors will need to earn a return; the bonds payments will need to be made.
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...
Summers are getting longer and hotter, glaciers and arctic ice are receding at record speeds, those are undeniable facts that everyone can see that with their own eyes.
So fuck right off with your Rupert-Murdoch-provided lies.
Before you say "I don't need people like him on my side"; think about whether that's actually true. Do you need _the majority_ of the world on board for the _global_ issue? Donald Trump as president of the U.S.A. is what happens with this kind of attitude.
If your goal is to be angry and self-righteous though, good job.
Get real. I used to sympathize with global warming deniers. It's 2023. The debate has been had for 40 years and now things are literally catching fire. There is not room for debate anymore.
The debate happened decades ago in academia. It is "settled science" as much as science can be "settled".
Here's a slightly better popular science source explaining this: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-risks-as-...
Fox was exposed as a liar in court documents. Yet people still cite them as "truthful" vs. sources like CNN (who to be fair, aren't great).
The problem is in lobbying and politicians. This would have no impact if politicians had a slight bit of a spine. They know the facts well and just don't care. The natural disasters that are hitting people in the face might solve this problem. Politicians are finally coming face to face with the results of their actions.
https://xkcd.com/1732/
One of the largest issues surrounding this particular problematic is the fact that people basically treat climate change as a meme.
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.
The USA drills as much as we consume. We drill more oil compared to Saudis and Russia
If they are acting as a cartel and coordinating among every refinery, how do you keep that hidden? You can't and the reward isn't worth being screwed by antitrust and all other backlash when you get caught.
In the US, existing refineries have significant pricing power because environmental laws have made it nearly impossible to build new ones. The issue is compounded in California by idiotic state laws that mandate a unique blend of gasoline only produced by a handful of refineries. This ends up being effectively a direct wealth transfer from consumers to refinery owners without even achieving any significant environment benefits.
I think this is the sort of argument that a lot of right wing folks would buy into. This needs to get into the national debate.
If lithium is battery substrate of choice then the actual raw materials suppliers are more numerous and are not highly correlated to OPEC members. So you get relative energy independence. As far as I know there is not any sort of lithium cartel that has formed as of yet.
Additionally as I understand it - since for grid scale, density is not a factor - there is not as strong a need for rare earth metals. [2]
[1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/iron-air-battery-renew... [2] https://www.energy-storage.news/comparing-six-types-of-lithi...
Due to the transportability of oil and the existence of a spot oil market, in times of high global/US oil demand, the US oil producers will sell out to the highest bidder and export our oil and basically take the profits at the expense of US energy users. [1]
Oil/LNG prices are a global market whereas solar+battery is a regional market unless grids are set up.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc...
Compare with fossil fuels, which can only be used once.
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.
> As we go into winter, we'll switch to a tariff which does cheap overnight charging so we can arbitrage on cost.
Seems it really didn't. What is your plan for the new way of getting electricity in winter?
But, except when they're literally covered in snow, my panels still chug along.
> It is important to be aware that different regions in the UK have different sun hours per day: England has 4.1, Scotland has 3.7, Northern Ireland 3.2 and Wales 3.3.
https://www.greenmatch.co.uk/blog/how-many-solar-panels-do-i...
Not disagreeing with what you’re saying, but your numbers will be different than mine.
But if you're not using much power at sunrise, that's still enough to charge your battery.
Even in Scotland, you can still hit your targets with a modestly sized array - https://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvg_tools/en/tools.html
and from the article
> the discussions seem stuck back in 2010, when solar power and electric vehicles were prohibitively expensive
It's an inconvenient truth that most people can not afford to pay €20-40k for something now, that will save them money in 8 years (and then, slowly). As the saying goes "it's too expensive to be poor" — except we're all "middle-class" now, apparently.
I agree that we should be subsidising the installation. And, indeed, lots of councils do group-buying schemes which do that. And there are semi-reasonable financing schemes available.
Installation costs can't be recovered, but a battery can certainly be repossessed. Unmounting solar panels is probably much more work, so I don't know. Or just add it to your home's existing mortgage, since then it's just repossessing the house with solar+battery included.
But the point is that, if the down payment is made small enough, the desired result is that you start saving money immediately, because your monthly financing payment is less than what you're saving on your electric bill.
Of course, ideally there's some kind of government subsidy here that makes it a no-brainer for banks, where the government pays the interest or down payment or something.
Thanks for sharing. Because it's indeed not well-known.
The logistics are really good. You can manufacture them in a factory. Ship them as a normal container. Drop them where they can be conveniently connected to the grid. And that's it.
"As we go into winter, we will leverage the super cheap battery poor folks are forced to pay to exist for us when it's convenient".
It's very hard to take these arguments seriously when that is really what is happening - relatively well off folks using the commons to subsidize themselves whilst patting themselves on the back about it.
Yes, it's a quite trivial problem when you get to outsource the hard bit of it and only have to pay for the low hanging profitable fruit.
Until your community battery gets into the weeks to month in storage capacity, these anecdotes really read disingenuous to me. Seasonal storage is the hard nut to crack, and we haven't even solved overnight storage for most places.
I've been spec'ing out truly off-grid designs lately, and it's an order of magnitude difference if you want to not use the public subsidy of your neighbors paying for it for you.
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.
I'm seeing lots of videos with a portable "5 gallon container" sized batteries that people are moving around.
Even better, since you can attach some solar panels and not have to go refill the container, unlike gas/diesel containers.
This isn't to say batteries/solar are perfect for this. But, they are certainly providing enough pros vs liquid fuels that tons of people are widely using them in place of gasoline/diesel/kerosene.
Personally, if I never have to hear a damn generator running all frigging day/night while at a campsite, the cost to switch to batteries/solar will have been entirely worthwhile.
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.
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.
0: https://pca.st/episode/77c6a8a5-4967-4a71-9da0-f1ab7d56c703
So for it to happen at large scale, we would need to see significant reductions in eg night time generation capacity. In my view this is unlikely (nuclear and wind will still run at night even if we close every coal, oil and gas fired generator).
people dont turn the oven/heating/kettle on when theyre in the car.
Personally I'm still not sure how the hell all the apartments and cities in the world are going to both install enough chargers and solve subscription charging when almost all the charger companies have absolute dogshit hardware on 3+ year old obsolete charging standards. Their software is so bad I can't believe someone was paid to write it. So, yeah, V2G? Let's get reliable managed chargers everywhere first and then think about the grid
> I get a little of this feeling when I watch Americans argue about climate change; the discussions seem stuck back in 2010
This article itself feels like a throwback to 2010. He acts like solar + batteries solves the entire problem. It doesn't. In fact, it barely scratches the surface. We have much larger needs such as industrial, heavy transportation, agriculture, etc. Writing an outdated article about the rapidly dropping price of solar power while handwaving all other problems doesn't solve the problem. The author is basically just now catching up to 2010. He is in reality still stuck in 2010 despite what he thinks.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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?
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.
Because historically we do not have technology complex enough to need specific minerals. Now we do.
> Most of these needs we can fulfill with many different minerals. And the amount of all [1] minerals in earths crust is staggering compared to any foreseeable futre, so we are just going to flip to whatever is easiest/cheapest to dig.
There is another factor at play though: energy required to extract the minerals. Ones deeper in the earth's crust are likely more energy intensive to extract and perhaps even purify. At some point it won't be worth it.
Right, the issue is cost of extraction (in materials, energy, and externalities, the only real currencies), not exhaustion of the reserves. I think Simon would argue 1) that the degree to which the current economy depends on fossil resources (e.g. for metal-working; how do we reach the required temperatures without melting an electrically-powered heating element?) has not been grasped by policy-makers or the public, and 2) that we are already in energy decline, exacerbated by ongoing failure of ecosystem services. In other words, he thinks we have bled too much momentum and triggered too many blowbacks to "level off" at current living standards, if that were even a viable path forward (given the rate at which we are destroying the biological basis for human life, it is not).