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Storage cost is falling even faster than solar PV or wind ever did.

by ncmncm 4y ago

sunmag 4y ago
.. Last I read even the automotive industry had trouble sourcing batteries. Would be interesting to know how many minutes(seconds?) of electricity we could store in all batteries produces last year should we go all in. This at least battery storage seems naive at such scale.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  - _-david-_ 4y ago
    Please stop accusing people of wishing for higher energy prices or being a troll. You have done it on a huge number of posts in this thread. If you want to convince anybody accusing them of wanting something bad is not the way to do it. In fact it makes you look like a troll.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
  - anonym29 4y ago
    I've heard of gravity batteries, but they are not a proven technology for utility-scale storage (yet). Can you please elaborate on what utility-scale storage will take the place of our current system whereby production generally scales up and down with demand, which will be more difficult with energy sources that can only produce intermittently like solar and wind? Hydro and wave energy generators look promising for baseline load, but those won't alleviate the need for utility-scale storage altogether, right?
anonym29 4y ago
The article I linked acknowledges this, and talks about it. Remember that like with Moore's law, there will eventually be hard, physics-based walls past which we will not progress without entirely new technology paradigms, which aren't guaranteed to be discovered in any finite amount of time. I'm glad it's getting cheaper, and I'm all for supplementing baseline load with solar, wind, and hydro, but I'm less confident with strategies that ultimately boil down to placing trust in improvements that we may or may not reach. That's not an assertion that reaching, say, $10/kWh for storage won't be possible, but I think it would be wise to have a plan B in case we're unable to get it lower than, say, $100/kWh. Not having a Plan B and placing almost all of our eggs in one basket (fossil fuels) is how we got to this point in the first.

Storage cost is falling even faster than solar PV or wind ever did.

by ncmncm 4y ago

Storage cost is falling even faster than solar PV or wind ever did.

.. Last I read even the automotive industry had trouble sourcing batteries. Would be interesting to know how many minutes(seconds?) of electricity we could store in all batteries produces last year should we go all in. This at least battery storage seems naive at such scale.

ncmncm 4y ago
- _-david-_ 4y ago
  Please stop accusing people of wishing for higher energy prices or being a troll. You have done it on a huge number of posts in this thread. If you want to convince anybody accusing them of wanting something bad is not the way to do it. In fact it makes you look like a troll.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
- anonym29 4y ago
  I've heard of gravity batteries, but they are not a proven technology for utility-scale storage (yet). Can you please elaborate on what utility-scale storage will take the place of our current system whereby production generally scales up and down with demand, which will be more difficult with energy sources that can only produce intermittently like solar and wind? Hydro and wave energy generators look promising for baseline load, but those won't alleviate the need for utility-scale storage altogether, right?

anonym29 4y ago

The article I linked acknowledges this, and talks about it. Remember that like with Moore's law, there will eventually be hard, physics-based walls past which we will not progress without entirely new technology paradigms, which aren't guaranteed to be discovered in any finite amount of time. I'm glad it's getting cheaper, and I'm all for supplementing baseline load with solar, wind, and hydro, but I'm less confident with strategies that ultimately boil down to placing trust in improvements that we may or may not reach. That's not an assertion that reaching, say, $10/kWh for storage won't be possible, but I think it would be wise to have a plan B in case we're unable to get it lower than, say, $100/kWh. Not having a Plan B and placing almost all of our eggs in one basket (fossil fuels) is how we got to this point in the first.