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> In the past few years, lithium ion battery storage has plummeted in cost and is seeing massive deployment all around the grid. I advize doing the maths on th

> In the past few years, lithium ion battery storage has plummeted in cost and is seeing massive deployment all around the grid. I advize doing the maths on this. Look at graphs of how much solar and win vary, check total elecricity consumption, look up latest price of li ion batteries and then do a bit of maths to see how much you need so that you get no blackouts in a 10 year period. Then realize you should use compressed air storage instead... Last I checked, if we use the cheapest form of storage (compressed air) and assume there are enough suitable caves for the huge amount we want, we'd triple electricity costs by switching to renewables+storage. > And one dirty secret that they don't tell you about nuclear: it's also going to need storage. Not really, you just need to be able to burn excess power. Which is a very easy thing to do (you can spend as much as you want on turning atmospheric CO2 and water into methane).

epistasis 4y ago
I have done the math, and that's why I think that nuclear will only be a niche, and expensive, form of energy for a few countries that do not have good renewable resources. As for CAES, if it can scale and be cheap, great. But there isn't nearly as much evidence of that for CAES as there is for batteries, which are being deployed by the GWh on the grid now, and which have massive plans for expansion in areas where the grid is market based and profit driven, instead of a regulated monopoly that can rest on its laurels. I occasionally hear about liquid air too, and though everybody I have encountered that works on it is a bit nuts, I am more optimistic about liquid air than CAES for massive scale, as liquid air can be deployed many many places.