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> Batteries are catching up. Are they? The US consumes 11.5TWh of electricity daily. It's estimated that it needs 3 weeks if storage to get to 100% carbon free

> Batteries are catching up. Are they? The US consumes 11.5TWh of electricity daily. It's estimated that it needs 3 weeks if storage to get to 100% carbon free [1]. By comparison global battery production in 2019 was 300GWh [2]. Even if you factor in the fact that the curve of battery production is rising, it'd take decades to fullfil just the US's storage demands with batteries. There are other storage options like hydroelectricity and pumping air into mineshafts, but those are geographically limited. 1. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-storage-80-percent-wind-solar/ https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-stora... 2. https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/14/global-lithium-ion-battery-planned-capacity-update-9-growth-in-a-single-month-march-charts/amp/ https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/14/global-lithium-ion-batt...

toomuchtodo 6y ago
They are [1]. It’s a self reinforcing cycle. For example, batteries are already cheaper than most gas peakers. That demand (along with EVs demand, primarily Tesla) ramps manufacturing capacity, realizing further cost declines along the way. Remember, the sun and wind are free once the turbines and panels are installed (both which last at least two decades). That’s what fossil and nuclear are competing against, and it’s a losing battle. Sounds like those companies that sell batteries to utilities and consumers are in a very favorable position, considering the storage requirements you note. [1] https://about.bnef.com/blog/battery-pack-prices-fall-as-market-ramps-up-with-market-average-at-156-kwh-in-2019/ https://about.bnef.com/blog/battery-pack-prices-fall-as-mark...
- manfredo 6y ago
  Yes, the capacity is increasing. But there's still a massive disconnect between the amount of battery storage required to make renewables usable and the capacity that exists. The link I posted already factors in increasing demand, but the amount of battery production in these projections is still orders of magnitude lower than what is requires. 3 weeks of energy storage in the US works out to 240 TWh given its daily 11.5 TWh consumption. Even if we assume that the projections are accurate and that global battery production will reach 1 TWh in 2023 and 2 TWh per year in 2030, we're still talking about several decades worth of global battery production just to supply the United States' storage requirements. Even just reaching the 12 hours of storage required to reach 80% renewables is going to be difficult to achieve. The reality is that storage even remotely close to what is necessary to run a country predominantly on intermittent sources has never been built. This is totally uncharted territory as far as energy infrastructure goes. And none of our current solutions are capable of delivering the required scale, save for geographically limited options like hydroelectricity. By comparison, multiple countries generate the majority of their electricity from nuclear power, and one has generated over 80% of its energy from nuclear. Between building a wholly novel solution and simply replicating an existing solution, the latter is almost always the easier task. This thread is being rate limited, reply in edit: > 1. Instantaneous excess can electrolyse water, producing hydrogen which can be converted into methane and stored/used in existing natural gas systems. This is much more difficult to do than it sounds. In order to convert hydrogen into methane you need a source of carbon. The fraction of a percent of carbon that exists in the atmosphere cannot feasibly be used. The plans to use synthetic methane as energy storage are contingent on somehow capturing the carbon from burning a gas turbine. California tried to do this by pumping the exhaust into mine shaft, but a leak was sprung and the gas escaped. Not to mention, places without mineshafts nearby have to construct structures to store the exhaust. > 2. Overcapacity in good times implies proportionally higher production in bad times, lowering the storage requirements. No it does not. Overcapacity of solar doesn't make the sun shine at night. Overcapacity of wind somewhat increases production in less windy days, but a totally windless day still generates zero energy regardless of overcapacity.
  - ben_w 6y ago
    What feels like an obvious solution (and is therefore probably wrong), is that excess renewable production can mitigate that in two ways: 1. Instantaneous excess can electrolyse water, producing hydrogen which can be converted into methane and stored/used in existing natural gas systems. 2. Overcapacity in good times implies proportionally higher production in bad times, lowering the storage requirements.
christkv 6y ago
Or stacking blocks https://qz.com/1355672/stacking-concrete-blocks-is-a-surprisingly-efficient-way-to-store-energy/ https://qz.com/1355672/stacking-concrete-blocks-is-a-surpris...
- manfredo 6y ago
  Apparently each of these structures stores 20 MWh of energy. By comparison, the US consumes 11.5 TWh of electricity daily. To reach the 12 hours of storage estimated to be necessary to reach 80% renewable generation we'd need 287,500 of these towers. To reach the 3 weeks of storage necessary for 100% renewable generation we'd need 12,075,000 of these towers.
  - samatman 6y ago
    The former is easily achievable, if the towers are profitable to install. We only have to build them one at a time, and if a collection of 10-50 is cheaper than a peaker gas plant, then the utility decommissions the latter and builds the former. The latter is simply not necessary. There are a number of ways to solve the last few percent, including leaving a few peaker plants running; presumably, we'll do all of them. Those peakers can be carbon-neutral, because it's possible to run CO2 extractors. One implication of our renewables is that there are times when they generate power considerably in excess of requirements: using that energy to sequester carbon is plausible. Of course, if we got over our civilizational horror of nuclear energy, we could solve this problem in a thorough and boring way. I'm not holding my breath.
    - christkv 6y ago
      Thorium reactors or pebble bed reactors might be options. The only reason we have the current designs is due to the us navies need to build a reactor that would fit on submarines and ships. That technology became the basis for our deployed reactors. Since then nothing else has been tried outside of small experimental plants from what I understand.
imtringued 6y ago
This is getting tiring... No, nobody is insane enough to only use batteries. They are primarily used to load-shift by a few hours within a 24 hour window. This is mostly useful for PV because it has a very low window during which it generates energy. Longer term storage would simply involve power to gas infrastructure. Alternatively you can use natural gas as your storage mechanism until power to gas has been implemented. A lot of complaints against renewables are rooted in the myth of "baseload". For renewables to be effective they have to be available 24/7 except this is completely wrong. The atmosphere doesn't care if you pollute at 3 am or at 3 pm. A kilogram of CO2 is a kilogram of CO2. All you have to look at is how much renewable energy has been produced per year and divide it by total energy produced per year to calculate the renewable share. As long as that number goes up you're reducing CO2 emissions. Of course at some point you hit a roadblock where that share ceases to go up because you need to store energy but no country on earth has reached that point. Here is an in-depth article that explains how 100% renewables could be implemented: https://cleantechnica.com/2020/02/09/correcting-anti-renewable-energy-propaganda/ https://cleantechnica.com/2020/02/09/correcting-anti-renewab...
- manfredo 6y ago
  Existing energy storage options other than batteries are either geographically limited, or not feasible. I explain the issues with natural gas storage in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24253317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24253317 You can't just produce natural gas out of hydrogen and air, you need a source of carbon (and the fraction of a percent of the carbon in the atmosphere cannot feasibly be used). Yes, solar and wind can mitigate fossil fuel use in the short term. But there is no feasible way to use them for the primary source of energy without massive amounts of storage. It provides an option to produce some carbon-free energy, but does not provide an option to go from "some" to "all". If we actually want to stop climate change, we need to go for "all". The link you posted does not refute this. The solution proposed in the article is to just use fossil fuel backup plants until a storage solution is found. Germany and California are both already approaching the saturation point for daytime generation. And once you hit that point there's no way to keep going without massive amounts of storage to transfer the excess generation during peak hours to non-producing hours. Intermittent sources cheaply reduce carbon emissions in the short term, but offer no path to fully renewable energy without a miraculous advancement in energy storage. The paper you linked to doesn't refute this. The plan laid out amounts to, "keep burning fossil fuels and hope we eventually figure out energy storage". When the fate of the world is at stake do you want to bet on an unknown and unproven solution, or a solution that has successfully delivered the lion's share of a nation's power since the 1980s?
philipkglass 6y ago
The full paper from citation 1 is available here: "Geophysical constraints on the reliability of solar and wind power in the United States" https://escholarship.org/content/qt96315051/qt96315051.pdf https://escholarship.org/content/qt96315051/qt96315051.pdf If you look at Figure 2, they model different combinations of overproduction, storage, and regional aggregation (interconnection). Overproduction helps significantly. At 50% (1.5x) overproduction, the United States can supply 75% of demand with no storage and little new interconnection. At 1.5x overproduction with 12 hours of storage, it can supply 95% of demand with even less interconnection. If the AP1000 units under construction at Plant Vogtle do not go over budget any further, they will have cost $11.20 per watt to construct [1] -- $25 billion spread over 2234 MW of generating capacity. If they have a capacity factor of 93%, that's $12.04 per watt of annualized output. Utility scale solar in the United States achieves an average capacity factor of 25% as of 2018 [2] and had a median construction cost of $1.60 per watt as of 2018 [3], with costs still falling. That's $6.40 per watt of annualized output, or $9.60 with 1.5x overproduction. Wind costs are similar. Wind has higher up front construction costs but also higher capacity factors in favorable regions. Once constructed, solar and wind also have lower operation and maintenance costs per MWh generated than nuclear plants do. I was very enthusiastic about nuclear power from about 2000-2015. I still think that it's safe enough and far cleaner than fossil power. We shouldn't shut any operating reactors down prematurely. But large scale renewable projects have cut costs drastically since the turn of the millennium while new nuclear projects keep going late and over budget. The EPR and AP1000 reactors were supposed to be the standardized, affordable, predictable reactors that retired the nuclear industry's history of cost overruns and schedule blowouts. Instead they have become spectacular contemporary examples of those same old problems. [1] "Vogtle Cost Upgrade Causes Rethinking of $25B Nuclear Plant’s Future" https://www.power-eng.com/2018/08/09/vogtle-cost-upgrade-causes-rethinking-of-nuclear-plant-s-future/ https://www.power-eng.com/2018/08/09/vogtle-cost-upgrade-cau... [2] "Capacity Factors for Utility Scale Generators Primarily Using Non-Fossil Fuels" https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_6_07_b https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph... [3] "Utility Scale Solar: Empirical Trends in Project Technology, Cost, Performance, and PPA Pricing in the United States - 2019 Edition" https://emp.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/lbnl_utility_scale_solar_2019_edition_final.pdf https://emp.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/lbnl_utility_scale_s...

toomuchtodo 6y ago

They are [1]. It’s a self reinforcing cycle. For example, batteries are already cheaper than most gas peakers. That demand (along with EVs demand, primarily Tesla) ramps manufacturing capacity, realizing further cost declines along the way. Remember, the sun and wind are free once the turbines and panels are installed (both which last at least two decades). That’s what fossil and nuclear are competing against, and it’s a losing battle. Sounds like those companies that sell batteries to utilities and consumers are in a very favorable position, considering the storage requirements you note. [1] https://about.bnef.com/blog/battery-pack-prices-fall-as-market-ramps-up-with-market-average-at-156-kwh-in-2019/ https://about.bnef.com/blog/battery-pack-prices-fall-as-mark...

manfredo 6y ago
Yes, the capacity is increasing. But there's still a massive disconnect between the amount of battery storage required to make renewables usable and the capacity that exists. The link I posted already factors in increasing demand, but the amount of battery production in these projections is still orders of magnitude lower than what is requires. 3 weeks of energy storage in the US works out to 240 TWh given its daily 11.5 TWh consumption. Even if we assume that the projections are accurate and that global battery production will reach 1 TWh in 2023 and 2 TWh per year in 2030, we're still talking about several decades worth of global battery production just to supply the United States' storage requirements. Even just reaching the 12 hours of storage required to reach 80% renewables is going to be difficult to achieve. The reality is that storage even remotely close to what is necessary to run a country predominantly on intermittent sources has never been built. This is totally uncharted territory as far as energy infrastructure goes. And none of our current solutions are capable of delivering the required scale, save for geographically limited options like hydroelectricity. By comparison, multiple countries generate the majority of their electricity from nuclear power, and one has generated over 80% of its energy from nuclear. Between building a wholly novel solution and simply replicating an existing solution, the latter is almost always the easier task. This thread is being rate limited, reply in edit: > 1. Instantaneous excess can electrolyse water, producing hydrogen which can be converted into methane and stored/used in existing natural gas systems. This is much more difficult to do than it sounds. In order to convert hydrogen into methane you need a source of carbon. The fraction of a percent of carbon that exists in the atmosphere cannot feasibly be used. The plans to use synthetic methane as energy storage are contingent on somehow capturing the carbon from burning a gas turbine. California tried to do this by pumping the exhaust into mine shaft, but a leak was sprung and the gas escaped. Not to mention, places without mineshafts nearby have to construct structures to store the exhaust. > 2. Overcapacity in good times implies proportionally higher production in bad times, lowering the storage requirements. No it does not. Overcapacity of solar doesn't make the sun shine at night. Overcapacity of wind somewhat increases production in less windy days, but a totally windless day still generates zero energy regardless of overcapacity.
- ben_w 6y ago
  What feels like an obvious solution (and is therefore probably wrong), is that excess renewable production can mitigate that in two ways: 1. Instantaneous excess can electrolyse water, producing hydrogen which can be converted into methane and stored/used in existing natural gas systems. 2. Overcapacity in good times implies proportionally higher production in bad times, lowering the storage requirements.

christkv 6y ago

Or stacking blocks https://qz.com/1355672/stacking-concrete-blocks-is-a-surprisingly-efficient-way-to-store-energy/ https://qz.com/1355672/stacking-concrete-blocks-is-a-surpris...

manfredo 6y ago
Apparently each of these structures stores 20 MWh of energy. By comparison, the US consumes 11.5 TWh of electricity daily. To reach the 12 hours of storage estimated to be necessary to reach 80% renewable generation we'd need 287,500 of these towers. To reach the 3 weeks of storage necessary for 100% renewable generation we'd need 12,075,000 of these towers.
- samatman 6y ago
  The former is easily achievable, if the towers are profitable to install. We only have to build them one at a time, and if a collection of 10-50 is cheaper than a peaker gas plant, then the utility decommissions the latter and builds the former. The latter is simply not necessary. There are a number of ways to solve the last few percent, including leaving a few peaker plants running; presumably, we'll do all of them. Those peakers can be carbon-neutral, because it's possible to run CO2 extractors. One implication of our renewables is that there are times when they generate power considerably in excess of requirements: using that energy to sequester carbon is plausible. Of course, if we got over our civilizational horror of nuclear energy, we could solve this problem in a thorough and boring way. I'm not holding my breath.
  - christkv 6y ago
    Thorium reactors or pebble bed reactors might be options. The only reason we have the current designs is due to the us navies need to build a reactor that would fit on submarines and ships. That technology became the basis for our deployed reactors. Since then nothing else has been tried outside of small experimental plants from what I understand.

imtringued 6y ago

This is getting tiring... No, nobody is insane enough to only use batteries. They are primarily used to load-shift by a few hours within a 24 hour window. This is mostly useful for PV because it has a very low window during which it generates energy. Longer term storage would simply involve power to gas infrastructure. Alternatively you can use natural gas as your storage mechanism until power to gas has been implemented. A lot of complaints against renewables are rooted in the myth of "baseload". For renewables to be effective they have to be available 24/7 except this is completely wrong. The atmosphere doesn't care if you pollute at 3 am or at 3 pm. A kilogram of CO2 is a kilogram of CO2. All you have to look at is how much renewable energy has been produced per year and divide it by total energy produced per year to calculate the renewable share. As long as that number goes up you're reducing CO2 emissions. Of course at some point you hit a roadblock where that share ceases to go up because you need to store energy but no country on earth has reached that point. Here is an in-depth article that explains how 100% renewables could be implemented: https://cleantechnica.com/2020/02/09/correcting-anti-renewable-energy-propaganda/ https://cleantechnica.com/2020/02/09/correcting-anti-renewab...

manfredo 6y ago
Existing energy storage options other than batteries are either geographically limited, or not feasible. I explain the issues with natural gas storage in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24253317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24253317 You can't just produce natural gas out of hydrogen and air, you need a source of carbon (and the fraction of a percent of the carbon in the atmosphere cannot feasibly be used). Yes, solar and wind can mitigate fossil fuel use in the short term. But there is no feasible way to use them for the primary source of energy without massive amounts of storage. It provides an option to produce some carbon-free energy, but does not provide an option to go from "some" to "all". If we actually want to stop climate change, we need to go for "all". The link you posted does not refute this. The solution proposed in the article is to just use fossil fuel backup plants until a storage solution is found. Germany and California are both already approaching the saturation point for daytime generation. And once you hit that point there's no way to keep going without massive amounts of storage to transfer the excess generation during peak hours to non-producing hours. Intermittent sources cheaply reduce carbon emissions in the short term, but offer no path to fully renewable energy without a miraculous advancement in energy storage. The paper you linked to doesn't refute this. The plan laid out amounts to, "keep burning fossil fuels and hope we eventually figure out energy storage". When the fate of the world is at stake do you want to bet on an unknown and unproven solution, or a solution that has successfully delivered the lion's share of a nation's power since the 1980s?

philipkglass 6y ago

The full paper from citation 1 is available here: "Geophysical constraints on the reliability of solar and wind power in the United States" https://escholarship.org/content/qt96315051/qt96315051.pdf https://escholarship.org/content/qt96315051/qt96315051.pdf If you look at Figure 2, they model different combinations of overproduction, storage, and regional aggregation (interconnection). Overproduction helps significantly. At 50% (1.5x) overproduction, the United States can supply 75% of demand with no storage and little new interconnection. At 1.5x overproduction with 12 hours of storage, it can supply 95% of demand with even less interconnection. If the AP1000 units under construction at Plant Vogtle do not go over budget any further, they will have cost $11.20 per watt to construct [1] -- $25 billion spread over 2234 MW of generating capacity. If they have a capacity factor of 93%, that's $12.04 per watt of annualized output. Utility scale solar in the United States achieves an average capacity factor of 25% as of 2018 [2] and had a median construction cost of $1.60 per watt as of 2018 [3], with costs still falling. That's $6.40 per watt of annualized output, or $9.60 with 1.5x overproduction. Wind costs are similar. Wind has higher up front construction costs but also higher capacity factors in favorable regions. Once constructed, solar and wind also have lower operation and maintenance costs per MWh generated than nuclear plants do. I was very enthusiastic about nuclear power from about 2000-2015. I still think that it's safe enough and far cleaner than fossil power. We shouldn't shut any operating reactors down prematurely. But large scale renewable projects have cut costs drastically since the turn of the millennium while new nuclear projects keep going late and over budget. The EPR and AP1000 reactors were supposed to be the standardized, affordable, predictable reactors that retired the nuclear industry's history of cost overruns and schedule blowouts. Instead they have become spectacular contemporary examples of those same old problems. [1] "Vogtle Cost Upgrade Causes Rethinking of $25B Nuclear Plant’s Future" https://www.power-eng.com/2018/08/09/vogtle-cost-upgrade-causes-rethinking-of-nuclear-plant-s-future/ https://www.power-eng.com/2018/08/09/vogtle-cost-upgrade-cau... [2] "Capacity Factors for Utility Scale Generators Primarily Using Non-Fossil Fuels" https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_6_07_b https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph... [3] "Utility Scale Solar: Empirical Trends in Project Technology, Cost, Performance, and PPA Pricing in the United States - 2019 Edition" https://emp.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/lbnl_utility_scale_solar_2019_edition_final.pdf https://emp.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/lbnl_utility_scale_s...