8 ms·

Where are the terawatts of batreries coming from? It will be decades before we have the manufacturing capacity to make that many batteries, assuming we have the

Where are the terawatts of batreries coming from? It will be decades before we have the manufacturing capacity to make that many batteries, assuming we have the natural resources to make that possible. Batteries are reasonably priced per unit, but they do not scale reasonably. Batteries will not provide grid scale storage in our lifetime, IMO. I think the concept of grid scale storage is misguided Fission (and hopefully fusion) can provide base load at all times, with as much wind & solar as needed to provide for variable load.

throwaway5959 4y ago
I’m going to guess lots of factories that we mass produce, aka gigafactories.
ben_w 4y ago
> Where are the terawatts of batreries coming from? The usual place: factories. Which are getting built as fast as people can get the investment money and the planning permits. > It will be decades before we have the manufacturing capacity to make that many batteries, Even if that was correct (from what I've seen, half of what we need is already being planned and is scheduled for completion before 2030), even then it would be fine, as we only have a critical need of them when renewables become a dominant part of the power grid. > assuming we have the natural resources to make that possible. We do, despite the memes. > I think the concept of grid scale storage is misguided Fission (and hopefully fusion) can provide base load at all times If the whole world did that with fission, we'd run out of fissile materials pretty fast.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  > despite the memes. As far as I can determine the typical commenter believes that a lithium-ion battery is just solid lithium. I believe this is a result of a sustained campaign of disinformation driven by fossil fuel interests. In reality, a standard 18650 cell contains less than a gram of lithium.
  - Manuel_D 4y ago
    Who cares about breakdown by mass. Break a battery cell down by cost: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/breaking-down-the-cost-of-an-ev-battery-cell/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/breaking-down-the-cost-of-a... The cathode alone contributes to half of the cost of a lithium ion battery. Shortages of lithium are indeed driving up the prices of batteries. If doesn't matter if a small amount of it is necessary, if obtaining even that small amount is expensive.
    - jeffbee 4y ago
      And yet, all battery makers are continuously reducing the need for expensive materials in their cathodes, because humans respond to incentives. Never bet against human ingenuity.
      - Manuel_D 4y ago
        And yet, battery costs are still rising: https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Market-Spotlight/Battery-costs-rise-as-lithium-demand-outstrips-supply https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Market-Spotlight/Battery-c... Ingenuity can't change thermodynamics. There's a minimum amount of lithium necessary to hold a charge. Realistically the only reliable path of grid scale battery storage is a different batter chemistry, but none has proven as effective as lithium ion so far.
        jeffbee 4y ago
        The minimum amount of lithium necessary for utility-scale batteries is zero because many of them are made of lead-acid batteries, because nobody gives a damn how bulky and massive a battery is in fixed service. This has nothing to do with thermodynamics and everything to do with you parroting anti-renewable propaganda.
        Manuel_D 4y ago
        Lead acid batteries have much lower life cycles. Often around 300 cycles at 80% depth of discharge. True, bulk does not matter. But replacing your batteries every year absolutely does. That's why most battery storage projects use lithium batteries.
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  > > assuming we have the natural resources to make that possible. > We do, despite the memes. Markets disagree: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium
  - epistasis 4y ago
    No, that's not what markets are saying. They are saying "build more extraction capacity" but they certainly are not saying "there are fundamental limitations on lithium supply"
    - Manuel_D 4y ago
      Right, and unless we are able to build more extraction capacity there is indeed going to be a fundamental limitation on lithium supply. "Build more mines" is a lot easier said than done. The nature of mining is that the most accessible reserves are exploited first, and more and more difficult to access sites get developed as scarcity grows. The common discourse around lithium ion batteries doesn't comprehend the idea of input limitations. If they were taken back to 1920, they'd look at how a car cost $100,000 in 1910 and $10,000 in 1920 and conclude that cars will cost $1,000 in 1930, $100 in 1940 and $10 in 1950. They'll just build more iron mines and steel mills. That's not how it works: mining isn't as amenable to order of magnitude increases: A car cannot cost less than it's constituent input materials, and mining and metallurgy can't deliver at that scale.
      - epistasis 4y ago
        > The common discourse around lithium ion batteries doesn't comprehend the idea of input limitations. I'm not sure I agree with that at all. Even Fox News reported on the IEA's "we need more mineral extraction than fossil fuel extraction" report from a few years ago, because my anti-wind-power father got on the phone to tell me as soon as he heard it, as if it would surprise me at all. Everybody knows we need this stuff, and I have never encountered a person that disagrees in the least. Cost drops for lithium ion batteries are not coming from lower input costs, and in fact input costs are going up. Batteries are getting cheaper because of process improvements, using less materials, less labor, etc. The same thing happened in solar, cost drops come from improved tech that use less material and manufacturing improvements, not from cheaper inputs. The story of industrialization is a story of innovating around materials shortages, finding alternatives, and continually outcompeting the older less innovative companies. I don't know why problem suddenly forget this when it comes to renewables.
- missedthecue 4y ago
  There is conversation about whether we have sufficient extractable lithium reserves to replace 2 billion ICE cars. Do you we have enough lithium to do that and back up the entire global grid?
  - ben_w 4y ago
    For currently identified reserves of lithium perhaps, but: 1) we stopped putting much effort into looking when we had more than we could mine — there's not much point looking inside mountains when there are known huge salt lakes where evaporation has conveniently concentrated it on the surface. 2) the rate of discovery (in the "you're not literally tripping over it") category implies there is much more that is still easy to find. The estimated total yet to be located is far more than we need. And 3), batteries aren't reliant on lithium, lithium is merely convenient and cheap. Sodium-ion batteries are available as an alternative.
    - bradknowles 4y ago
      Lithium can be obtained from plain old seawater. The issue is that the concentration per liter is low so it takes a lot of seawater to obtain useful amounts of lithium -- it concentrates out just like any other salt, and as we know seawater is saltwater. But these processes are getting more efficient. And you can also recover other salts from seawater that may also be commercially useful. This is a planetary scale resource that can be "mined" from just about any coastline anywhere in the world.
epistasis 4y ago
> Batteries are reasonably priced per unit, but they do not scale reasonably. What is your basis for the second part, that batteries can not scale? This seems to be an article of faith among many, but there's no data that can back it up, and it doesn't pass a basic sniff test, using common comparisons. For example, a car that drives 300,000 miles in its lifetime, at say 30mpg, would consume 10,000 gallons of gasoline, weighing approximately 100,000 pounds. This is an order of magnitude more weight than the battery, and the battery can be recycled into new batteries afterwards, it's not even consumed. Why, with this fantastic reduction in the amount of input materials needed, would batteries of all things run out of materials? State your reasoning, please! We are currently producing ~300GWh lithium ion batteries per year, and will likely 10x our production every five years, according to the industry reference I heard a year or two ago. The idea that we won't have grid scale batteries within our lifetimes is contradicted by actual reality, today. Competing batteries to fission is a sever blind spot that seems endemic. We have a shipping off the shelf tech that is scaling at an amazing rate, yet it's compared to science fiction that has been decades away for half a century. This is exactly the blindness people have about batteries, and it's why all the traditional car manufacturers have been caught completely flat footed in the transition to EVs All other areas of energy are going to be caught completely flat footed because Pepe for some reason believe fantasies about batteries rather than the real operating truth right in front of their eyes. What I can't figure out is, why?
- adhesive_wombat 4y ago
  > yet it's compared to science fiction that has been decades away for half a century. That's fusion, not fission. Though certainly it's possible fission has missed the window and, by the time terawatts of it could be designed, approved and built, solar, wind and others will have taken over.
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    Fission at scale is science fiction. There are no closed loop fuel cycles and 6TWe of PWR reactors would exhaust world reserves un under 5 years. Reprocessing all of the waste adds maybe a year, and enriching the tailings adds maybe another year. Sea mining and breeders are significantly less real than 46% efficient solar or 1200Wh/kg AlS batteries.
pseudosavant 4y ago
I think people need to realize that not all batteries are chemical. There are many ways to store/recover electric energy: a motor/generator with weights, a pump/turbine with water, motor/generator with a spinning kinetic mass in a vacuum, etc.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  People also need to realize that none of these solutions have been proven to work at scale.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    So, like nuclear? Which also has not been proven to work at the scale needed to decarbonize the world. In particular, current commercial burner reactors are unsuitable for that, as the uranium runs out very quickly at that scale.
    - dmitriid 4y ago
      Not sure which world you've been living in, but nuclear has been proven to work at scale, while requiring significantly less area than solar or wind, and being able to be load bearing and load following.
      - pfdietz 4y ago
        If the world's entire current primary energy demand were supplied with burner reactors -- about 6000 3MW(th) reactors -- the world's estimated uranium resource would last about five years. Your "at scale" is a tiny fraction of the scale that would be needed, and at that larger, true scale, current commercially demonstrated nuclear technology would quickly fail. Breeders would be needed to enable use of much more expensive uranium ores (or thorium), and those are not demonstrated at even your smaller scale.
Schroedingersat 4y ago
> I think the concept of grid scale storage is misguided Fission (and hopefully fusion) can provide base load at all times, with as much wind & solar as needed to provide for variable load. Where is the uranium coming from? Commercial fast breeders are as mythical as a 10000Wh/kg AlS battery. All nuclear reactors that aren't fiction are just a small multiplier on the U235 supply including DT fusion.

throwaway5959 4y ago

I’m going to guess lots of factories that we mass produce, aka gigafactories.

ben_w 4y ago

> Where are the terawatts of batreries coming from? The usual place: factories. Which are getting built as fast as people can get the investment money and the planning permits. > It will be decades before we have the manufacturing capacity to make that many batteries, Even if that was correct (from what I've seen, half of what we need is already being planned and is scheduled for completion before 2030), even then it would be fine, as we only have a critical need of them when renewables become a dominant part of the power grid. > assuming we have the natural resources to make that possible. We do, despite the memes. > I think the concept of grid scale storage is misguided Fission (and hopefully fusion) can provide base load at all times If the whole world did that with fission, we'd run out of fissile materials pretty fast.

jeffbee 4y ago
> despite the memes. As far as I can determine the typical commenter believes that a lithium-ion battery is just solid lithium. I believe this is a result of a sustained campaign of disinformation driven by fossil fuel interests. In reality, a standard 18650 cell contains less than a gram of lithium.
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  Who cares about breakdown by mass. Break a battery cell down by cost: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/breaking-down-the-cost-of-an-ev-battery-cell/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/breaking-down-the-cost-of-a... The cathode alone contributes to half of the cost of a lithium ion battery. Shortages of lithium are indeed driving up the prices of batteries. If doesn't matter if a small amount of it is necessary, if obtaining even that small amount is expensive.
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    And yet, all battery makers are continuously reducing the need for expensive materials in their cathodes, because humans respond to incentives. Never bet against human ingenuity.
    - Manuel_D 4y ago
      And yet, battery costs are still rising: https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Market-Spotlight/Battery-costs-rise-as-lithium-demand-outstrips-supply https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Market-Spotlight/Battery-c... Ingenuity can't change thermodynamics. There's a minimum amount of lithium necessary to hold a charge. Realistically the only reliable path of grid scale battery storage is a different batter chemistry, but none has proven as effective as lithium ion so far.
      - jeffbee 4y ago
        The minimum amount of lithium necessary for utility-scale batteries is zero because many of them are made of lead-acid batteries, because nobody gives a damn how bulky and massive a battery is in fixed service. This has nothing to do with thermodynamics and everything to do with you parroting anti-renewable propaganda.
        Manuel_D 4y ago
        Lead acid batteries have much lower life cycles. Often around 300 cycles at 80% depth of discharge. True, bulk does not matter. But replacing your batteries every year absolutely does. That's why most battery storage projects use lithium batteries.
Manuel_D 4y ago
> > assuming we have the natural resources to make that possible. > We do, despite the memes. Markets disagree: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium
- epistasis 4y ago
  No, that's not what markets are saying. They are saying "build more extraction capacity" but they certainly are not saying "there are fundamental limitations on lithium supply"
  - Manuel_D 4y ago
    Right, and unless we are able to build more extraction capacity there is indeed going to be a fundamental limitation on lithium supply. "Build more mines" is a lot easier said than done. The nature of mining is that the most accessible reserves are exploited first, and more and more difficult to access sites get developed as scarcity grows. The common discourse around lithium ion batteries doesn't comprehend the idea of input limitations. If they were taken back to 1920, they'd look at how a car cost $100,000 in 1910 and $10,000 in 1920 and conclude that cars will cost $1,000 in 1930, $100 in 1940 and $10 in 1950. They'll just build more iron mines and steel mills. That's not how it works: mining isn't as amenable to order of magnitude increases: A car cannot cost less than it's constituent input materials, and mining and metallurgy can't deliver at that scale.
    - epistasis 4y ago
      > The common discourse around lithium ion batteries doesn't comprehend the idea of input limitations. I'm not sure I agree with that at all. Even Fox News reported on the IEA's "we need more mineral extraction than fossil fuel extraction" report from a few years ago, because my anti-wind-power father got on the phone to tell me as soon as he heard it, as if it would surprise me at all. Everybody knows we need this stuff, and I have never encountered a person that disagrees in the least. Cost drops for lithium ion batteries are not coming from lower input costs, and in fact input costs are going up. Batteries are getting cheaper because of process improvements, using less materials, less labor, etc. The same thing happened in solar, cost drops come from improved tech that use less material and manufacturing improvements, not from cheaper inputs. The story of industrialization is a story of innovating around materials shortages, finding alternatives, and continually outcompeting the older less innovative companies. I don't know why problem suddenly forget this when it comes to renewables.
missedthecue 4y ago
There is conversation about whether we have sufficient extractable lithium reserves to replace 2 billion ICE cars. Do you we have enough lithium to do that and back up the entire global grid?
- ben_w 4y ago
  For currently identified reserves of lithium perhaps, but: 1) we stopped putting much effort into looking when we had more than we could mine — there's not much point looking inside mountains when there are known huge salt lakes where evaporation has conveniently concentrated it on the surface. 2) the rate of discovery (in the "you're not literally tripping over it") category implies there is much more that is still easy to find. The estimated total yet to be located is far more than we need. And 3), batteries aren't reliant on lithium, lithium is merely convenient and cheap. Sodium-ion batteries are available as an alternative.
  - bradknowles 4y ago
    Lithium can be obtained from plain old seawater. The issue is that the concentration per liter is low so it takes a lot of seawater to obtain useful amounts of lithium -- it concentrates out just like any other salt, and as we know seawater is saltwater. But these processes are getting more efficient. And you can also recover other salts from seawater that may also be commercially useful. This is a planetary scale resource that can be "mined" from just about any coastline anywhere in the world.

epistasis 4y ago

> Batteries are reasonably priced per unit, but they do not scale reasonably. What is your basis for the second part, that batteries can not scale? This seems to be an article of faith among many, but there's no data that can back it up, and it doesn't pass a basic sniff test, using common comparisons. For example, a car that drives 300,000 miles in its lifetime, at say 30mpg, would consume 10,000 gallons of gasoline, weighing approximately 100,000 pounds. This is an order of magnitude more weight than the battery, and the battery can be recycled into new batteries afterwards, it's not even consumed. Why, with this fantastic reduction in the amount of input materials needed, would batteries of all things run out of materials? State your reasoning, please! We are currently producing ~300GWh lithium ion batteries per year, and will likely 10x our production every five years, according to the industry reference I heard a year or two ago. The idea that we won't have grid scale batteries within our lifetimes is contradicted by actual reality, today. Competing batteries to fission is a sever blind spot that seems endemic. We have a shipping off the shelf tech that is scaling at an amazing rate, yet it's compared to science fiction that has been decades away for half a century. This is exactly the blindness people have about batteries, and it's why all the traditional car manufacturers have been caught completely flat footed in the transition to EVs All other areas of energy are going to be caught completely flat footed because Pepe for some reason believe fantasies about batteries rather than the real operating truth right in front of their eyes. What I can't figure out is, why?

adhesive_wombat 4y ago
> yet it's compared to science fiction that has been decades away for half a century. That's fusion, not fission. Though certainly it's possible fission has missed the window and, by the time terawatts of it could be designed, approved and built, solar, wind and others will have taken over.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  Fission at scale is science fiction. There are no closed loop fuel cycles and 6TWe of PWR reactors would exhaust world reserves un under 5 years. Reprocessing all of the waste adds maybe a year, and enriching the tailings adds maybe another year. Sea mining and breeders are significantly less real than 46% efficient solar or 1200Wh/kg AlS batteries.

pseudosavant 4y ago

I think people need to realize that not all batteries are chemical. There are many ways to store/recover electric energy: a motor/generator with weights, a pump/turbine with water, motor/generator with a spinning kinetic mass in a vacuum, etc.

dmitriid 4y ago
People also need to realize that none of these solutions have been proven to work at scale.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- pfdietz 4y ago
  So, like nuclear? Which also has not been proven to work at the scale needed to decarbonize the world. In particular, current commercial burner reactors are unsuitable for that, as the uranium runs out very quickly at that scale.
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    Not sure which world you've been living in, but nuclear has been proven to work at scale, while requiring significantly less area than solar or wind, and being able to be load bearing and load following.
    - pfdietz 4y ago
      If the world's entire current primary energy demand were supplied with burner reactors -- about 6000 3MW(th) reactors -- the world's estimated uranium resource would last about five years. Your "at scale" is a tiny fraction of the scale that would be needed, and at that larger, true scale, current commercially demonstrated nuclear technology would quickly fail. Breeders would be needed to enable use of much more expensive uranium ores (or thorium), and those are not demonstrated at even your smaller scale.

Schroedingersat 4y ago

> I think the concept of grid scale storage is misguided Fission (and hopefully fusion) can provide base load at all times, with as much wind & solar as needed to provide for variable load. Where is the uranium coming from? Commercial fast breeders are as mythical as a 10000Wh/kg AlS battery. All nuclear reactors that aren't fiction are just a small multiplier on the U235 supply including DT fusion.