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> money is overwhelmingly better spent on building out renewable generating capacity than on storage. Yes, the world uses about 18 TW (continous). If we wante
by tuatoru 4y ago
> money is overwhelmingly better spent on building out renewable generating capacity than on storage.
Yes, the world uses about 18 TW (continous). If we wanted to provide all that with PV at 20% capacity factor and with a lifetime of 20 years, we need to be producing 5 TW of PV panels per year.*
Currently we're making around one percent of that.
* Actually we don't need all that. The 18 TW is based on "primary energy supply" which ignores the two-thirds energy losses with fossil fuel based supply. In terms of delivered, useful power, we only probably need 8-ish TW currently.
- ncmncm 4y agoWe need to build way more PV factories. But building the wrong kind would be counterproductive. If perovskites end up way better, it would be wasteful to have built out too many new silicon cell factories. While building out storage now would be a mistake, we should be building factories for storage like crazy. Every kind. We don't know which storage methods will win, but we can't afford to wait and find out.