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Because your "explanations" are incorrect. You just assume storage systems will become multiple orders of magnitude cheaper than they are today, and offer no re

Because your "explanations" are incorrect. You just assume storage systems will become multiple orders of magnitude cheaper than they are today, and offer no reason to justify this assumption. In fact, read what TFA actually says about storage; > Key pillars of this new energy system are solar and wind energy, energy storage, sector coupling, and electrification of all energy and industry sectors implying power-to-X and hydrogen-to-X solutions, complemented by upcoming carbon dioxide removal. I chuckled when I read "Power-to-X". It's a pretty funny way of saying "we no idea how to deliver storage at this scale".

pfdietz 4y ago
No, I do not assume storage systems become multiple orders of magnitude cheaper than they are today. Even the storage systems available at today's price points would allow renewables to be leveled at a price that could be afforded. Rather modest reductions in cost would be preferable, of course, and we can expect those to occur. Power-to-X is using technologies that are mostly off the shelf. The particularly important one that wasn't, low cost electrolyzers, has seen tremendous progress. The Chinese are now selling these for < $300/kW, a fraction of the price assumed in the 2030 assumptions in that modeling site I like to point to.
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  Except storage systems today don't scale and become more expensive when deployed at anything close to grid scale. Google told me that lithium ion batteries are $130-150 per KWh. But it turns out when you try to buy loads of them they become scarce and the price goes up. New York ended up paying over $500 for it's storage: https://www.utilitydive.com/news/new-york-battery-storage-costs-rise-interconnection-queue-12-gw/621954/ https://www.utilitydive.com/news/new-york-battery-storage-co... Keep stanning "Power-to-X" solutions. But until you actually have a solution for X that works at grid scale, there's no real solution. Just empty promises. You edited your post after I replied: > Power-to-X is using technologies that are mostly off the shelf. The particularly important one that wasn't, low cost electrolyzers, has seen tremendous progress. The Chinese are now selling these for < $300/kW, a fraction of the price assumed in the 2030 assumptions in that modeling site I like to point to. Except none of those systems scale. If they did, the article would have actually specified the storage system. But then they'd have to stand up to scrutiny over whether that storage system can actually deliver at the promised scale. Because it can't, they use ambiguous language like "power to X".
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    You are repeating the same tired bullshit here. When supply is constrained, greatly increased demand can drive up prices. That doesn't mean storage doesn't scale, it just means we haven't built enough factories yet. I'm sure you can remember many episodes in computing where the price of something (DRAMs, GPUs, whatever) temporarily went up because of supply constraints. It would have been deeply foolish to proclaim this mean price declines were over. A similar thing happened with PV back around 2009 or so. The long term decline trend appeared to stall, because of poly-Si shortages. Dishonest skeptics claimed PV cost declines were over. What happened then? The prices provided incentive for more manufacturing capacity to be added, and the decline tracked back to the long term downward trend line.
    - Manuel_D 4y ago
      Not just factories, also the mines that are needed to feed input materials to those factories: https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/batteries/chart-lithium-prices-are-through-the-roof-this-year https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/batteries/chart-lithium... You know what we call it when factories and raw materials can't keep up with the demand and lead to skyrocketing costs? A system that doesn't scale. DRAM and GPUs aren't bottlenecked by raw materials the way energy storage is. It was a shortage of electrical components, not a shortage of copper. It is a very wrong assumption to think that resource extractions behaves like semiconductor manufacturing.
      - pfdietz 4y ago
        Yes, and all of those things can be scaled up. I will further say that for your argument to be correct, it must be correct not just for Li-ion batteries, but for all possible storage technologies. You have not, and indeed cannot, make that argument with any level of honesty, since you do not know the bounds of such technologies. This does not stop you from making it though, which is very sad.
        Manuel_D 4y ago
        No, you can't just "scale up" mining by a factor of 1000. And yes, that's the kind of increase we'll need to make storage systems viable. I don't think you fully appreciate just how massive an undertaking it is to provide the storage required to make intermittent sources viable. It's estimated it'll take 3 weeks of storage to make intermittent sources viable: 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... By comparison, the world uses 60TWh of electricity daily. There is no realistic plan to build this amount of storage. You have not, and indeed cannot, honestly make the argument that it's within our capacity to build storage at such a scale. Hence why you point to untested storage systems like compressed air or hydrogen electrolysis. We don't know that they will scale, since we have not attempted to build them at scale. You take this absence of evidence as proof that they will scale instead of recognizing it for what it is: and absence of evidence since hardly any of these storage systems have been built. This is your pattern of commenting: you concede that the storage systems that we have built at scale don't work. Then you point to the storage systems that we haven't built at scale and assume they will work at scales dwarfing anything we've built so far. We do not have the capacity to build storage to make intermittent sources viable. You just assume that every new and untested storage system will be super cheap even when it's built by the terawatt hour. And then you call people dishonest when the point out that you're the one being dishonest about our experience with energy storage.

pfdietz 4y ago

No, I do not assume storage systems become multiple orders of magnitude cheaper than they are today. Even the storage systems available at today's price points would allow renewables to be leveled at a price that could be afforded. Rather modest reductions in cost would be preferable, of course, and we can expect those to occur. Power-to-X is using technologies that are mostly off the shelf. The particularly important one that wasn't, low cost electrolyzers, has seen tremendous progress. The Chinese are now selling these for < $300/kW, a fraction of the price assumed in the 2030 assumptions in that modeling site I like to point to.

Manuel_D 4y ago
Except storage systems today don't scale and become more expensive when deployed at anything close to grid scale. Google told me that lithium ion batteries are $130-150 per KWh. But it turns out when you try to buy loads of them they become scarce and the price goes up. New York ended up paying over $500 for it's storage: https://www.utilitydive.com/news/new-york-battery-storage-costs-rise-interconnection-queue-12-gw/621954/ https://www.utilitydive.com/news/new-york-battery-storage-co... Keep stanning "Power-to-X" solutions. But until you actually have a solution for X that works at grid scale, there's no real solution. Just empty promises. You edited your post after I replied: > Power-to-X is using technologies that are mostly off the shelf. The particularly important one that wasn't, low cost electrolyzers, has seen tremendous progress. The Chinese are now selling these for < $300/kW, a fraction of the price assumed in the 2030 assumptions in that modeling site I like to point to. Except none of those systems scale. If they did, the article would have actually specified the storage system. But then they'd have to stand up to scrutiny over whether that storage system can actually deliver at the promised scale. Because it can't, they use ambiguous language like "power to X".
- pfdietz 4y ago
  You are repeating the same tired bullshit here. When supply is constrained, greatly increased demand can drive up prices. That doesn't mean storage doesn't scale, it just means we haven't built enough factories yet. I'm sure you can remember many episodes in computing where the price of something (DRAMs, GPUs, whatever) temporarily went up because of supply constraints. It would have been deeply foolish to proclaim this mean price declines were over. A similar thing happened with PV back around 2009 or so. The long term decline trend appeared to stall, because of poly-Si shortages. Dishonest skeptics claimed PV cost declines were over. What happened then? The prices provided incentive for more manufacturing capacity to be added, and the decline tracked back to the long term downward trend line.
  - Manuel_D 4y ago
    Not just factories, also the mines that are needed to feed input materials to those factories: https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/batteries/chart-lithium-prices-are-through-the-roof-this-year https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/batteries/chart-lithium... You know what we call it when factories and raw materials can't keep up with the demand and lead to skyrocketing costs? A system that doesn't scale. DRAM and GPUs aren't bottlenecked by raw materials the way energy storage is. It was a shortage of electrical components, not a shortage of copper. It is a very wrong assumption to think that resource extractions behaves like semiconductor manufacturing.
    - pfdietz 4y ago
      Yes, and all of those things can be scaled up. I will further say that for your argument to be correct, it must be correct not just for Li-ion batteries, but for all possible storage technologies. You have not, and indeed cannot, make that argument with any level of honesty, since you do not know the bounds of such technologies. This does not stop you from making it though, which is very sad.
      - Manuel_D 4y ago
        No, you can't just "scale up" mining by a factor of 1000. And yes, that's the kind of increase we'll need to make storage systems viable. I don't think you fully appreciate just how massive an undertaking it is to provide the storage required to make intermittent sources viable. It's estimated it'll take 3 weeks of storage to make intermittent sources viable: 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... By comparison, the world uses 60TWh of electricity daily. There is no realistic plan to build this amount of storage. You have not, and indeed cannot, honestly make the argument that it's within our capacity to build storage at such a scale. Hence why you point to untested storage systems like compressed air or hydrogen electrolysis. We don't know that they will scale, since we have not attempted to build them at scale. You take this absence of evidence as proof that they will scale instead of recognizing it for what it is: and absence of evidence since hardly any of these storage systems have been built. This is your pattern of commenting: you concede that the storage systems that we have built at scale don't work. Then you point to the storage systems that we haven't built at scale and assume they will work at scales dwarfing anything we've built so far. We do not have the capacity to build storage to make intermittent sources viable. You just assume that every new and untested storage system will be super cheap even when it's built by the terawatt hour. And then you call people dishonest when the point out that you're the one being dishonest about our experience with energy storage.