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Not sure if I missed it but didn’t see anything in your source to back up this 7 years worth of battery production requirement for what the US needs in stationa

Not sure if I missed it but didn’t see anything in your source to back up this 7 years worth of battery production requirement for what the US needs in stationary storage. Without seeing how we got to the number, I’m skeptical. Things worth considering: 1) decommissioned battery packs from electric cars will eventually have 2nd lives on the grid 2) the manufacturing capacity of li-ion globally today is paltry compared what’s needed just in the batteries for mobility, let alone grid storage. Just like underestimations done for solar and wind, I expect current projections to be undershooting where we’ll end up 3) effective demand response (ramping up and down variable loads like commercial refrigeration, heating water, among others) based on renewable generation levels can effectively replace large chunks of battery storage requirements. 4) wind and solar generation profiles compliment each other - when it is usually sunny, it’s not too windy and when it’s colder (night, winter) wind generates more. Add in negative energy prices in periods of excess generation / curtailment - that is economic opportunity for energy storage to come in and capture value 5) li-ion batteries as they are today are effective for “peak shifting” applications of moving energy across a few hours, but not across weeks or even across seasons. Where it is applicable, pumped hydro and other tech can better fill those other spaces - but we can still make lots of progress prior to those ramping up. 6)Investing in broadening the connectedness of grids across states / countries / continents is another way to reduce generation variability with renewables as across, say North America - it may not be very windy in one state at a given moment but 1000mi away it could be either sunny or windy elsewhere. Smoothing the generation across geographies and types ( connecting hydro and nuclear to more grids) is another way to reduce the amount of energy storage required on a grid.

Manfredo_1 6y ago
> Not sure if I missed it but didn’t see anything in your source to back up this 7 years worth of battery production requirement for what the US needs in stationary storage. The source is a curve of projected battery production. You take the integral of the curve. The US consumes 4TWh of electricity per day. 3 days of storage is 12 TWh. The 3 day capacity estimate already includes solar and wind generation complementing each other. Wind can produce energy at night, but is more variable over the long term. Decommissioned battery packs don't change global lithium ion battery production. We're currently producing 300GWh of battery capacity each year. Even if we stopped making electric vehicles and electronics and dedicated 100% of global battery production to grid storage we'd still have 40 years to reach 30TWh at current production capacity. Production capacity is projected to increase year over year so the overall time to reach this capacity would be less. But it's still nowhere remotely feasible, especially when you consider that we can't actually dedicate 100% of battery production capacity to grid storage. This is even further compounded by the fact that batteries wear out after a few thousand cycles. There are theoretical ways to recycle batteries, but we'd need to recycle them in extremely large capacities. The notion that battery storage is remotely feasible comes from the erroneous idea that technologies applicable to household use can scale up to heavy industry. This is not the case. This is why places like Germany and California hit a wall and have been unable to generate more than 50% of their energy from carbon free sources. It's no possible without highly scalable storage. And the only storage we have that's remotely scalable is geographically limited (hydro).
- clomond 6y ago
  Thanks for the reply, Manfredo. Apologies for not clearly stating that what I wanted to know was not how you did your math, but your source/the modelling behind the '3 days of storage' number which I didn't see in your source. The points in my previous reply were all in questioning the need for everywhere to have '3 days of energy storage' in order for us to significantly decarbonize. While it might represent a theoretical metric based on the state of the world today, I am doubtful it includes the points I mentioned, particularly demand response and continent wide grids connected with HVDC transmission lines (both of which are under discussions in various parts of the world). Additionally, the same principle applies with a server/service uptime reaching 100%. Realistically, we talk about 'how many 9s'. 99% uptime is much easier than 99.999%. Pushing the last 10% of fossil fuels off our grid will be hard, and the last 1% even harder, 0.1% etc as you start covering all the edge cases until we get to 100%. Probably will not get to 100% in our lifetimes. But I'd bet that we will get to 80% and maybe even 90% much faster than what status quo projects. Using Germany and California as an example, where many of my points above do not apply (and they are still able to get to 50% renewable generation) I view as a good sign. Neither grid has a particularly large amount of installed storage, connectedness to other grids or integrated demand response either. Getting the world to even 80% renewables will require no-where near the '3 days of storage', particularly as other tech (like storing energy as heat in blocks when there is excess energy) becomes viable in this decade. Many parts of the world have less than single digit penetration of renewables today - we have lots of room to go. Additionally, solar's cost is declining quickly (disclaimer & note: I am in the solar industry and see these cost declines continuing apace) and have seen first hand people starting to 'overbuild' their solar sites. Factor overbuilt solar, and that it has a unique property of 'predictability' (you KNOW for sure the sun will rise tomorrow, you don't know if it will be windy at all in the next 2 weeks). Given that even a very cloudy day can still generate a large fraction of the peak energy capacity - any excess can be curtailed until that capacity can find somewhere valuable to go as the grids and other energy storage tech beyond li-ion evolves.
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Manfredo_1 6y ago

> Not sure if I missed it but didn’t see anything in your source to back up this 7 years worth of battery production requirement for what the US needs in stationary storage. The source is a curve of projected battery production. You take the integral of the curve. The US consumes 4TWh of electricity per day. 3 days of storage is 12 TWh. The 3 day capacity estimate already includes solar and wind generation complementing each other. Wind can produce energy at night, but is more variable over the long term. Decommissioned battery packs don't change global lithium ion battery production. We're currently producing 300GWh of battery capacity each year. Even if we stopped making electric vehicles and electronics and dedicated 100% of global battery production to grid storage we'd still have 40 years to reach 30TWh at current production capacity. Production capacity is projected to increase year over year so the overall time to reach this capacity would be less. But it's still nowhere remotely feasible, especially when you consider that we can't actually dedicate 100% of battery production capacity to grid storage. This is even further compounded by the fact that batteries wear out after a few thousand cycles. There are theoretical ways to recycle batteries, but we'd need to recycle them in extremely large capacities. The notion that battery storage is remotely feasible comes from the erroneous idea that technologies applicable to household use can scale up to heavy industry. This is not the case. This is why places like Germany and California hit a wall and have been unable to generate more than 50% of their energy from carbon free sources. It's no possible without highly scalable storage. And the only storage we have that's remotely scalable is geographically limited (hydro).

clomond 6y ago
Thanks for the reply, Manfredo. Apologies for not clearly stating that what I wanted to know was not how you did your math, but your source/the modelling behind the '3 days of storage' number which I didn't see in your source. The points in my previous reply were all in questioning the need for everywhere to have '3 days of energy storage' in order for us to significantly decarbonize. While it might represent a theoretical metric based on the state of the world today, I am doubtful it includes the points I mentioned, particularly demand response and continent wide grids connected with HVDC transmission lines (both of which are under discussions in various parts of the world). Additionally, the same principle applies with a server/service uptime reaching 100%. Realistically, we talk about 'how many 9s'. 99% uptime is much easier than 99.999%. Pushing the last 10% of fossil fuels off our grid will be hard, and the last 1% even harder, 0.1% etc as you start covering all the edge cases until we get to 100%. Probably will not get to 100% in our lifetimes. But I'd bet that we will get to 80% and maybe even 90% much faster than what status quo projects. Using Germany and California as an example, where many of my points above do not apply (and they are still able to get to 50% renewable generation) I view as a good sign. Neither grid has a particularly large amount of installed storage, connectedness to other grids or integrated demand response either. Getting the world to even 80% renewables will require no-where near the '3 days of storage', particularly as other tech (like storing energy as heat in blocks when there is excess energy) becomes viable in this decade. Many parts of the world have less than single digit penetration of renewables today - we have lots of room to go. Additionally, solar's cost is declining quickly (disclaimer & note: I am in the solar industry and see these cost declines continuing apace) and have seen first hand people starting to 'overbuild' their solar sites. Factor overbuilt solar, and that it has a unique property of 'predictability' (you KNOW for sure the sun will rise tomorrow, you don't know if it will be windy at all in the next 2 weeks). Given that even a very cloudy day can still generate a large fraction of the peak energy capacity - any excess can be curtailed until that capacity can find somewhere valuable to go as the grids and other energy storage tech beyond li-ion evolves.
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