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You should look at the amount of battery plants that are being built right now. This is just in Europe. Economies of scale at work. https://mobile.twitter.com/Z

You should look at the amount of battery plants that are being built right now. This is just in Europe. Economies of scale at work. https://mobile.twitter.com/ZennRoland/status/1353821694411026434/photo/1 https://mobile.twitter.com/ZennRoland/status/135382169441102...

moffkalast 5y ago
An annual production of 600 GWh worth of batteries, that will be mostly used in vehicles. For reference, annual EU power production is roughly 2778000 GWh, it's a drop in an ocean. Li-Ions are frankly a terrible solution for grid storage, pumped hydro is the only thing that makes sense on these scales.
- cinntaile 5y ago
  The production will likely increase if the demand is there and we're not trying to replace the yearly power production. It has its downsides but it's easier to implement than huge hydro infrastructure projects. We'll see a mix of different technologies I guess, depending on the local possibilities.
- ben_w 5y ago
  We don’t need a year of storage, and any unit can be used at least 1000 times (I forget the exact number). PV being as cheap as it is, it isn’t totally crazy to suggest so much overproduction that 24h of storage is enough. I expect not optimal, but not wildly so. That reduces the 2778000 GWh to 7610 GWh, which only needs replacing at most every 3 years. I’m supporting nuclear (and brought up hydro in the first place) because something might get in the way of scaling up battery production or prevent batteries from getting much cheaper (last I checked there’re more expensive per lifetime unit stored than nuclear is per unit generated), but it definitely isn’t crazy to think it will scale up to the required level and come down in price.
throwaway894345 5y ago
I don’t think you appreciate how small that is compared to what would be required for global grid storage. Using numbers from Wikipedia, the world uses something like 2200 TWh of energy every week. The figure I’ve heard thrown around for necessary grid storage is “weeks”, so we’ll say 1 week of storage is required. That means it would take Europe 3700 years to produce enough batteries to build the batteries we need in the next 50ish years. Or if you prefer, we need to produce an annual 44TWh of batteries a year globally for the next 50 years, which means we need 75-Europes-worth of production capacity. Further still, energy demand is projected to increase as the global population grows and as standards of living increase. Even worse, scaling anything isn’t linear. It’s likely a lot easier to scale from 1GWh/year to 10GWh/year than it is to scale from 10 to 100. For example, in the first 10x scale, you might be able to pull a certain kind of skilled labor or raw material from other industries, but for the next 10x you now need to increase the global supply of said skilled labor or raw material.
- ben_w 5y ago
  > That means it would take Europe 3700 years to produce enough batteries to build the batteries we need in the next 50ish years. It would probably help to show the working here: 600 GWh/year times 3700 years is 2220 TWh, but if you really do need them to last a week, 1000 cycles at one per week means they last about 20 years. As 1000 is an underestimate, this seems broadly correct to me given current battery construction. However: First, we will occasionally want them to last a week; most of the time you’d only want a day. This gives us longer to build out whatever solutions, more battery factories or reactors or whatever. Second, it is very plausible the non-linearity of scaling will reduce costs rather than increase them. After all, that is what has happened so far, and as for workforce there will be a lot of coal miners available to switch to copper etc. I’m not saying this is certain to happen, just that it’s at least plausible. Third, my personal favourite combo with batteries is intercontinental HVDC — shift time zones or hemispheres and you don’t need to care about night or winter, but even much shorter links will connect you with a desert with a completely different climate and weather. Every 1 GW of capacity is 1 GW * (your desired storage duration in hours) of storage you no longer need (same for every 1 GW of nuclear, obviously). If we need a week of storage as you suggest, a single 1 GW line would save on 168 GWh of batteries. I’m only expecting us to do HVDC in the order of length of e.g. EU to Sahara and therefore only limiting our storage requirement to about a day of storage, perhaps even as good as just overnight storage, but the longer the storage period we need the better relative value a planetary scale grid looks like. (Downside: an antipodal ring big enough for world power use about a decade of worldwide aluminium production, or alternatively five decades of copper[0]. Again, this is why I prefer mixed approaches). [0] One of my older comments did the maths for just Europe and just to the Sahara, so multiply the “3 months” and “about a year” in the linked comment by 10 for antipodal and another 5 for global electrical demand: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28474201 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28474201
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    > It would probably help to show the working here: Fair enough, I was on mobile. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consumption#Final_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consum..., the world consumed 9,717 Mtoe or 112,717.2 TWh of energy in 2020. Dividing that number by 52 weeks/year gives us 2,167 TWh--the amount of energy we need for a week's worth of storage. 2,167 is about 3612 times the amount of capacity that Europe is slated to produce annually (previously I rounded various figures before doing the math, so my number rounded up to 3700 rather than down to 3600). But as previously mentioned, this doesn't account for growing energy demands or wear on battery stock or many other pertinent factors. > First, we will occasionally want them to last a week; most of the time you’d only want a day. This gives us longer to build out whatever solutions, more battery factories or reactors or whatever. My "week" figure is based on the assumption that we need to be able to manage with near-zero wind/sun for a week. While most of the time you won't need a week, we're not concerned about "most of the time", we're concerned about the worst cases. By the way, I have no idea if a week is accurate. I've just heard "weeks" slung around, so I assume that "one week" is the low end. I would be surprised if we could get this down to a day on average. Mind you, this doesn't mean we need 1 week of storage, but it means we need 1 week of something besides solar/wind. > Second, it is very plausible the non-linearity of scaling will reduce costs rather than increase them I agree. The specific dynamics depend on the market and the supply chain, but I'm pessimistic, especially after seeing the havoc covid continues to wreak on supply chains the world over. > Third, my personal favourite combo with batteries is intercontinental HVDC This is really interesting. I always been a bit surprised that electricity isn't more fungible from region to region, and wondered why this was never really talked about as a serious mitigation against regional weather patterns. I've been thinking about clean energy as Europe's key to energy independence, but it would be cruelly ironic if Europe came to depend on simply a different region for its energy (and also for Africa, if its sunshine had the effect that oil tends to have on poorer countries).

moffkalast 5y ago

An annual production of 600 GWh worth of batteries, that will be mostly used in vehicles. For reference, annual EU power production is roughly 2778000 GWh, it's a drop in an ocean. Li-Ions are frankly a terrible solution for grid storage, pumped hydro is the only thing that makes sense on these scales.

cinntaile 5y ago
The production will likely increase if the demand is there and we're not trying to replace the yearly power production. It has its downsides but it's easier to implement than huge hydro infrastructure projects. We'll see a mix of different technologies I guess, depending on the local possibilities.
ben_w 5y ago
We don’t need a year of storage, and any unit can be used at least 1000 times (I forget the exact number). PV being as cheap as it is, it isn’t totally crazy to suggest so much overproduction that 24h of storage is enough. I expect not optimal, but not wildly so. That reduces the 2778000 GWh to 7610 GWh, which only needs replacing at most every 3 years. I’m supporting nuclear (and brought up hydro in the first place) because something might get in the way of scaling up battery production or prevent batteries from getting much cheaper (last I checked there’re more expensive per lifetime unit stored than nuclear is per unit generated), but it definitely isn’t crazy to think it will scale up to the required level and come down in price.

throwaway894345 5y ago

I don’t think you appreciate how small that is compared to what would be required for global grid storage. Using numbers from Wikipedia, the world uses something like 2200 TWh of energy every week. The figure I’ve heard thrown around for necessary grid storage is “weeks”, so we’ll say 1 week of storage is required. That means it would take Europe 3700 years to produce enough batteries to build the batteries we need in the next 50ish years. Or if you prefer, we need to produce an annual 44TWh of batteries a year globally for the next 50 years, which means we need 75-Europes-worth of production capacity. Further still, energy demand is projected to increase as the global population grows and as standards of living increase. Even worse, scaling anything isn’t linear. It’s likely a lot easier to scale from 1GWh/year to 10GWh/year than it is to scale from 10 to 100. For example, in the first 10x scale, you might be able to pull a certain kind of skilled labor or raw material from other industries, but for the next 10x you now need to increase the global supply of said skilled labor or raw material.

ben_w 5y ago
> That means it would take Europe 3700 years to produce enough batteries to build the batteries we need in the next 50ish years. It would probably help to show the working here: 600 GWh/year times 3700 years is 2220 TWh, but if you really do need them to last a week, 1000 cycles at one per week means they last about 20 years. As 1000 is an underestimate, this seems broadly correct to me given current battery construction. However: First, we will occasionally want them to last a week; most of the time you’d only want a day. This gives us longer to build out whatever solutions, more battery factories or reactors or whatever. Second, it is very plausible the non-linearity of scaling will reduce costs rather than increase them. After all, that is what has happened so far, and as for workforce there will be a lot of coal miners available to switch to copper etc. I’m not saying this is certain to happen, just that it’s at least plausible. Third, my personal favourite combo with batteries is intercontinental HVDC — shift time zones or hemispheres and you don’t need to care about night or winter, but even much shorter links will connect you with a desert with a completely different climate and weather. Every 1 GW of capacity is 1 GW * (your desired storage duration in hours) of storage you no longer need (same for every 1 GW of nuclear, obviously). If we need a week of storage as you suggest, a single 1 GW line would save on 168 GWh of batteries. I’m only expecting us to do HVDC in the order of length of e.g. EU to Sahara and therefore only limiting our storage requirement to about a day of storage, perhaps even as good as just overnight storage, but the longer the storage period we need the better relative value a planetary scale grid looks like. (Downside: an antipodal ring big enough for world power use about a decade of worldwide aluminium production, or alternatively five decades of copper[0]. Again, this is why I prefer mixed approaches). [0] One of my older comments did the maths for just Europe and just to the Sahara, so multiply the “3 months” and “about a year” in the linked comment by 10 for antipodal and another 5 for global electrical demand: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28474201 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28474201
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  > It would probably help to show the working here: Fair enough, I was on mobile. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consumption#Final_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consum..., the world consumed 9,717 Mtoe or 112,717.2 TWh of energy in 2020. Dividing that number by 52 weeks/year gives us 2,167 TWh--the amount of energy we need for a week's worth of storage. 2,167 is about 3612 times the amount of capacity that Europe is slated to produce annually (previously I rounded various figures before doing the math, so my number rounded up to 3700 rather than down to 3600). But as previously mentioned, this doesn't account for growing energy demands or wear on battery stock or many other pertinent factors. > First, we will occasionally want them to last a week; most of the time you’d only want a day. This gives us longer to build out whatever solutions, more battery factories or reactors or whatever. My "week" figure is based on the assumption that we need to be able to manage with near-zero wind/sun for a week. While most of the time you won't need a week, we're not concerned about "most of the time", we're concerned about the worst cases. By the way, I have no idea if a week is accurate. I've just heard "weeks" slung around, so I assume that "one week" is the low end. I would be surprised if we could get this down to a day on average. Mind you, this doesn't mean we need 1 week of storage, but it means we need 1 week of something besides solar/wind. > Second, it is very plausible the non-linearity of scaling will reduce costs rather than increase them I agree. The specific dynamics depend on the market and the supply chain, but I'm pessimistic, especially after seeing the havoc covid continues to wreak on supply chains the world over. > Third, my personal favourite combo with batteries is intercontinental HVDC This is really interesting. I always been a bit surprised that electricity isn't more fungible from region to region, and wondered why this was never really talked about as a serious mitigation against regional weather patterns. I've been thinking about clean energy as Europe's key to energy independence, but it would be cruelly ironic if Europe came to depend on simply a different region for its energy (and also for Africa, if its sunshine had the effect that oil tends to have on poorer countries).