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And which storage system is that? (parent post was edited with links after my response) Lithium ion battery production is at only ~400 GWh per year. By com

~~And which storage system is that?~~ (parent post was edited with links after my response) Lithium ion battery production is at only ~400 GWh per year. By comparison, the US uses 12,500 TWh of electricity daily, or just over 500 GWh per hour. And this is only electricity, not total energy usage. Attempting to provision widespread lithium ion storage would lead to demand shock and skyrocketing prices. Not to mention it would involve delaying transition from ICE vehicles to EVs. You're right in some scenarios: if a country has extensive dam networks, then yes renewables + storage could be cheaper. Dams provide immense energy storage capacity. Close the turbines when solar and wind are producing, open them when they're not. If a country is blessed with extensive hydroelectric potential then great. But hydroelectricity is a matter of geography, and plenty of regions do not have the right geography to construct dams. Lithium ion battery storage is not cheaper than nuclear, and is not produced at sufficient scale to be viable for grid storage. Other proposals like hydrogen storage, flywheels, etc. have not actually been deployed to the grid so we have no real-world cost history for these systems. Somebody writing a white paper claiming $X/KWh of storage and actually building a system are two very different things.

rcpt 5y ago
> 12,500 TWh of electricity daily You're simplifying out that electric consumption varies during the day.
- Manuel_D 5y ago
  Excellent point. Peak electricity consumption occurs during the evenings when solar is producing little, if any, electricity. Daily fluctuations of electricity usage put an even greater demand on electricity storage.
  - epistasis 5y ago
    That's not correct, peak demand is usually during mid-day, at least in the US: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=27212 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=27212
    - Manuel_D 5y ago
      I'm seeing it peak around the evening in all time zones. This is the link to the actual energy grid visualization tool: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/expanded-view/electric_overview/US48/US48/ElectricityOverview-2/edit https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/expanded-view/el... Browsing the last day's energy usage yields peaks at: Eastern: 8pm Central: 7pm Mountain 6pm Pacific: 5pm
      - qqqwerty 5y ago
        Due to AC usage, electricity demand tends to be much higher in the summers than in the winters. And the demand profile in the summers peaks in mid-late afternoon. i.e You are not looking at the highest overall peak of the year, just the hourly peaks from the last few days.
Tade0 5y ago
> Lithium ion battery storage is not cheaper than nuclear, and is not produced at sufficient scale to be viable for grid storage. It may not be so now, but in 7 years, or in other words, by the time a nuclear power plant commissioned today starts producing power, it definitely will. Global li-ion manufacturing capacity is poised to triple by 2024: https://www.luxresearchinc.com/blog/li-ion-manufacturing-in-2024-capacities-and-key-players https://www.luxresearchinc.com/blog/li-ion-manufacturing-in-... Without a sudden, disruptive change in the cost and rate of deployment of nuclear there doesn't exist a path for it become a significantly larger part of the energy mix.
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  > Global li-ion manufacturing capacity is poised to triple by 2024 But we need all of that to electrify transportation, so where do you get the ones for the power grid? Also, what happens to the price of batteries if you get rid of baseload and cause demand for batteries to spike much higher than even the increased amount of battery production capacity?
- Manuel_D 5y ago
  So 3 years from now, global lithium ion battery production will add up to ~3 hours of USA's electricity consumption? If we stop building EVs, electronics, etc. and dedicate all lithium ion battery production worldwide to grid storage in the US for 8 years we'll have enough for 1 day of electricity storage. Just for the USA. And how much storage we actually need? For 0% fossil fuel usage, some estimates place storage demands as high as 3 weeks [1]. This is still far from viable, even if the predictions hold true. It's also ignoring that electricity usage is predicted to increase substantially worldwide as countries develop, and that these predictions of lithium ion battery production might not pan out. It'd also severely delay adoption of electric vehicles, as battery capacity is being diverted to grid storage away from EVs. 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...
  - alfor 5y ago
    You usually oversize your production in renewable and get extra energy in your peak production. Here in Quebec we have a new tarification and smart water heater, house heating that do peak shaving. Some industries will have access to almost free energy in peak production period and will have incentives to do something valuable with it Charging of EV will certainly play a role too. Still nuclear can be useful if some country are able to build them fast enough and cheap enough.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
elihu 5y ago
> "By comparison, the US uses 12,500 TWh of electricity daily" I was suspicious of your numbers so I did a bunch of math and then realized you're using the European comma rather than a decimal. So 12,500 means 12.5, not 12500. (EIA.gov says the U.S. used about 3.8 trillion kilowatt hours in 2020 [1]. 3.8 trillion kilowatt hours equals 3.8 billion megawatt hours, equals 3.8 million gigawatt hours, equals 3.8 thousand terawatt hours per year or 10.4 twh per day. If we figure the U.S. has about a hundred million households and divide 3,800 twh by that, we get 38 megawatt hours per household per year. This is a very rough estimate, as it doesn't include industrial/commercial/government users. If we divide by 365*24 to cancel out the time units, we get an average consumption of .004338 MW or 4.338 kilowatts per household. That sounds about right.) Current battery production is only just barely getting started. China dominates production of LFP cells (which are ideal for grid storage) because of patents which are expiring, so hopefully we'll see more production outside of china in the near future. LFP cells aren't bottlenecked by nickel or cobalt, and so the main resource constraints I believe are lithium, aluminum, and copper which are all quite a bit cheaper and available in bigger quantities. I think prices are expected to eventually settle somewhere around $80 per kwh of capacity for the cells, and I don't think we're that far off that now. (LFP may eventually be displaced by something else, like lithium sulfur or solid state batteries or something, but I think LFP is probably good enough.) Maybe lithium or copper will become bottlenecks and prices will rise. Let's say prices do hold at about $80 per kwh. Maybe we'll round up to $120 per kwh to account for pack construction, a building to store the batteries, inverters, chargers, and so on. If the average U.S. adult-aged person uses about 2kw on average, then they need 48kwh of storage for 24 hours. That would be about $5760. If we amortize that over ten years, it's about $48 a month. That's kind of expensive, but it's within the realm of what can be done without assuming any major technological breakthroughs. We probably don't need 24 hours of storage, though, if we have enough renewable energy over-production and backup fossil fuel plants to use in extreme situations. [1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-electricity.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-elect...
- newyankee 5y ago
  LFP is also actually the perfect battery for urban transportation in tropical countries. Their low cost and economics would ensure a big transformation in coming years because few people understand the tremendous impact they have on lifecycle cost (due to high no of cycles). I personally feel that in 10 years in India it will be cheaper to rent an electric car running on LFP for trips < 300 km along with a driver (cheaper here) than buy your own car.

~~And which storage system is that?~~ (parent post was edited with links after my response) Lithium ion battery production is at only ~400 GWh per year. By com

rcpt 5y ago

> 12,500 TWh of electricity daily You're simplifying out that electric consumption varies during the day.

Manuel_D 5y ago
Excellent point. Peak electricity consumption occurs during the evenings when solar is producing little, if any, electricity. Daily fluctuations of electricity usage put an even greater demand on electricity storage.
- epistasis 5y ago
  That's not correct, peak demand is usually during mid-day, at least in the US: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=27212 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=27212
  - Manuel_D 5y ago
    I'm seeing it peak around the evening in all time zones. This is the link to the actual energy grid visualization tool: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/expanded-view/electric_overview/US48/US48/ElectricityOverview-2/edit https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/expanded-view/el... Browsing the last day's energy usage yields peaks at: Eastern: 8pm Central: 7pm Mountain 6pm Pacific: 5pm
    - qqqwerty 5y ago
      Due to AC usage, electricity demand tends to be much higher in the summers than in the winters. And the demand profile in the summers peaks in mid-late afternoon. i.e You are not looking at the highest overall peak of the year, just the hourly peaks from the last few days.

Tade0 5y ago

> Lithium ion battery storage is not cheaper than nuclear, and is not produced at sufficient scale to be viable for grid storage. It may not be so now, but in 7 years, or in other words, by the time a nuclear power plant commissioned today starts producing power, it definitely will. Global li-ion manufacturing capacity is poised to triple by 2024: https://www.luxresearchinc.com/blog/li-ion-manufacturing-in-2024-capacities-and-key-players https://www.luxresearchinc.com/blog/li-ion-manufacturing-in-... Without a sudden, disruptive change in the cost and rate of deployment of nuclear there doesn't exist a path for it become a significantly larger part of the energy mix.

AnthonyMouse 5y ago
> Global li-ion manufacturing capacity is poised to triple by 2024 But we need all of that to electrify transportation, so where do you get the ones for the power grid? Also, what happens to the price of batteries if you get rid of baseload and cause demand for batteries to spike much higher than even the increased amount of battery production capacity?
Manuel_D 5y ago
So 3 years from now, global lithium ion battery production will add up to ~3 hours of USA's electricity consumption? If we stop building EVs, electronics, etc. and dedicate all lithium ion battery production worldwide to grid storage in the US for 8 years we'll have enough for 1 day of electricity storage. Just for the USA. And how much storage we actually need? For 0% fossil fuel usage, some estimates place storage demands as high as 3 weeks [1]. This is still far from viable, even if the predictions hold true. It's also ignoring that electricity usage is predicted to increase substantially worldwide as countries develop, and that these predictions of lithium ion battery production might not pan out. It'd also severely delay adoption of electric vehicles, as battery capacity is being diverted to grid storage away from EVs. 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...
- alfor 5y ago
  You usually oversize your production in renewable and get extra energy in your peak production. Here in Quebec we have a new tarification and smart water heater, house heating that do peak shaving. Some industries will have access to almost free energy in peak production period and will have incentives to do something valuable with it Charging of EV will certainly play a role too. Still nuclear can be useful if some country are able to build them fast enough and cheap enough.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

elihu 5y ago

> "By comparison, the US uses 12,500 TWh of electricity daily" I was suspicious of your numbers so I did a bunch of math and then realized you're using the European comma rather than a decimal. So 12,500 means 12.5, not 12500. (EIA.gov says the U.S. used about 3.8 trillion kilowatt hours in 2020 [1]. 3.8 trillion kilowatt hours equals 3.8 billion megawatt hours, equals 3.8 million gigawatt hours, equals 3.8 thousand terawatt hours per year or 10.4 twh per day. If we figure the U.S. has about a hundred million households and divide 3,800 twh by that, we get 38 megawatt hours per household per year. This is a very rough estimate, as it doesn't include industrial/commercial/government users. If we divide by 365*24 to cancel out the time units, we get an average consumption of .004338 MW or 4.338 kilowatts per household. That sounds about right.) Current battery production is only just barely getting started. China dominates production of LFP cells (which are ideal for grid storage) because of patents which are expiring, so hopefully we'll see more production outside of china in the near future. LFP cells aren't bottlenecked by nickel or cobalt, and so the main resource constraints I believe are lithium, aluminum, and copper which are all quite a bit cheaper and available in bigger quantities. I think prices are expected to eventually settle somewhere around $80 per kwh of capacity for the cells, and I don't think we're that far off that now. (LFP may eventually be displaced by something else, like lithium sulfur or solid state batteries or something, but I think LFP is probably good enough.) Maybe lithium or copper will become bottlenecks and prices will rise. Let's say prices do hold at about $80 per kwh. Maybe we'll round up to $120 per kwh to account for pack construction, a building to store the batteries, inverters, chargers, and so on. If the average U.S. adult-aged person uses about 2kw on average, then they need 48kwh of storage for 24 hours. That would be about $5760. If we amortize that over ten years, it's about $48 a month. That's kind of expensive, but it's within the realm of what can be done without assuming any major technological breakthroughs. We probably don't need 24 hours of storage, though, if we have enough renewable energy over-production and backup fossil fuel plants to use in extreme situations. [1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-electricity.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-elect...

newyankee 5y ago
LFP is also actually the perfect battery for urban transportation in tropical countries. Their low cost and economics would ensure a big transformation in coming years because few people understand the tremendous impact they have on lifecycle cost (due to high no of cycles). I personally feel that in 10 years in India it will be cheaper to rent an electric car running on LFP for trips < 300 km along with a driver (cheaper here) than buy your own car.