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"Requires" is problematic. Do the next N steps of the transition need to block on the availability of storage? No. But, there's another angle to view this: pol

"Requires" is problematic. Do the next N steps of the transition need to block on the availability of storage? No. But, there's another angle to view this: political feasibility. People are dragging their feet. Why? Well, what is the value proposition of switching to renewable energy? Right now, it's roughly, "Unfortunately, the reliability may be a downgrade, but saving the planet is definitely worth the sacrifice." If you made a pie chart of people's reactions, there'd be a big wedge that says "I get it! I'm in!", another big wedge that says "eventually", and another big wedge that says "nope". If cheap, effective energy storage were a solved problem (commercialized, proven in the field), then the value proposition would be, "Renewable energy will save the planet and also provide everything you're accustomed to right now." The pie chart would look better. So, because political feasibility is required, decarbonization does sort of indirectly require storage. Tangent: for this reason, I think we should give storage the same incentives that we give to solar and wind. Possibly even larger ones since solar and wind are pretty good now but storage still needs lots of work.

techdragon 4y ago
Thing is, other than mass produced unit technology like li-po and li-ion cells, there’s precious little available storage. I tried to get quotes from a company that sells liquid flow redox batteries, the sort of technology that should scale volumetrically but it’s just not feasible for anyone to deliver beyond small deployments. We can’t order X-kWh storage off the shelves with anything but lithium batteries at the moment and until we can, there will be serious questions asked by people…even enthusiastic people like myself, because I look at the daily cycle count and go “fuck off” I’m not replacing 25% of a lithium battery tech based energy storage every 3 years, grid scale facilities are designed around 25 year cycles and anything with less than a 10 year lifetime feels like flushing money down the drain on razor thin margins, both economically and environmentally once you account for the manufacturing costs of the lithium based energy storage equipment.

techdragon 4y ago

Thing is, other than mass produced unit technology like li-po and li-ion cells, there’s precious little available storage. I tried to get quotes from a company that sells liquid flow redox batteries, the sort of technology that should scale volumetrically but it’s just not feasible for anyone to deliver beyond small deployments. We can’t order X-kWh storage off the shelves with anything but lithium batteries at the moment and until we can, there will be serious questions asked by people…even enthusiastic people like myself, because I look at the daily cycle count and go “fuck off” I’m not replacing 25% of a lithium battery tech based energy storage every 3 years, grid scale facilities are designed around 25 year cycles and anything with less than a 10 year lifetime feels like flushing money down the drain on razor thin margins, both economically and environmentally once you account for the manufacturing costs of the lithium based energy storage equipment.