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>Can we so lightly dismiss battery storage? We can because there is no battery storage technology today, nor is one upcoming, that would work on city scale (i.
by macspoofing 7y ago
>Can we so lightly dismiss battery storage?
We can because there is no battery storage technology today, nor is one upcoming, that would work on city scale (i.e. store enough energy to power a city and industry outside of ideal wind/solar times). For example, the Tesla-style deployments are only there to even out supply on the order of milliseconds and maybe seconds. That's still something, and does replace natural gas in those specific use-cases, but that's not what we need.
Worse, we don't even know of a battery technology that would be able to store power across seasons or years, as Wind and Solar are very seasonally dependent and may vary in output by an order of magnitude between, say, Summer and Winter. Furthermore, for wind deployments, you usually need to sample multiple years to figure out if the site is good enough because wind output can vary across multiple-years.
That's why wind/solar/natural gas is a package deal today and for the foreseeable future.