2 ms·

Quite the contrary, people vastly underestimate the cost of battery storage and neglect the fact that it's cost is increasing as input materials become more sca

Quite the contrary, people vastly underestimate the cost of battery storage and neglect the fact that it's cost is increasing as input materials become more scarce. Actual real-world cost of deployment is mugh higher than estimates [1] frequently exceeding $500/kWh. Estimates often exclude the cost of installation, maintenance, transformers to handle voltage conversion, etc. This is how $130/KWh battery costs turn into over $500/KWh of real world cost. Furthermore, the existing global production figures are somewhere around 400GWh per year. The world uses 60 TWh of electricity per day. Even just one day's worth of storage would mean dedicating 100% of battery production to grid storage for over a century. Actually attempting to providing a significant amount of battery storage would spike the cost of batteries as demand exceeds supply. The input materials for batteries have seen skyrocketing costs in the last couple years [2], and only 24% of battery cost is manufacturing. The rest is input materials. It is very dubious that batter production can keep up with the massive scale required by grid storage. Batteries can (and are) being deployed. But not at a scale that makes any difference, and it's unlikely they ever will be. 1. 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... 2. https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium 3. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/breaking-down-the-cost-of-an-ev-battery-cell/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/breaking-down-the-cost-of-a...

epistasis 4y ago
> Actual real-world cost of deployment is mugh higher than estimates [1] frequently exceeding $500/kWh. Can you point why you think this number, for installed battery cost, is somehow a contradiction of the numbers I posted? Additionally, temporary supply shortages due to massive new markers opening up as the cost drops is completely expected. All the temporary higher prices finance massive production capacity expansion that drops prices in the future. This is a well understood dynamic that we see again and again, even in fossil due production! > Even just one day's worth of storage would mean dedicating 100% of battery production to grid storage for over a century. There are two extreme errors with writing something like this: 1) assuming that battery production stays constant, when it has been growing 10x/5 years, and we are seeing unprecedented demand for new applications. 2) Using primary energy production for comparison to electrified electricity use, when electrified versions of the fossil fuel versions require 3x-4x less electricity. This sort of basic error is as bad as comparing 1GW of solar to 1GW of nuclear without correcting for capacity factor. With reasonable battery production scaling, we will be producing 20-30TWh/year of batteries in a decade. For comparison, it takes more than a decade for us to build a nuclear reactor in the West, so if we are in course to have a fully scaled battery production supply chain for global use, whereas we can't even scale nuclear construction in the US to match the rate at which we will be retiring our aging fleet over the next 20 years. It's time to take a serious look at what carbon-free energy tech is on the table right now and start deploying it as fast as possible, right now, today. At the same time, we should continue research into fanciful ideas like small modular nuclear reactors, in case they pan out. But we need to go to war with the army we have right now.
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  > It's time to take a serious look at what carbon-free energy tech is on the table right now and start deploying it as fast as possible, right now, today Correct. And with the battery production capacity we have "on the table right now" would take more than a century to produce 24 hours of storage capacity. Assuming that there's going to be massive multiple order-of-magnitude capacity increase is not taking a serious look at the tech we have today, it's a hugely optimistic take on what we might have decades from now. > With reasonable battery production scaling, we will be producing 20-30TWh/year of batteries in a decade. Again, you're literally assuming that battery production figures will increase by 50-80 times within a decade. This is the complete opposite of taking "what we have on the table now", it's assuming that we'll have an industry 50-80 times larger than what we presently have. Moore's law rarely applied to produces outside of semiconductors, because most products hit bottlenecks with inputs. > But we need to go to war with the army we have right now. And again, "the army we have now" would take a century to produce only 16 hours worth for storage for the world via batteries. Actually, it'd take even more than that because after a century global electricity use will have increased substantially as the global south develops and wants amenities like air conditioning. I'm really puzzled by why you chose to close with this statement given that your proposal is to assume that our metaphorical army will be 50-80 times larger by the end of the decade.

epistasis 4y ago

> Actual real-world cost of deployment is mugh higher than estimates [1] frequently exceeding $500/kWh. Can you point why you think this number, for installed battery cost, is somehow a contradiction of the numbers I posted? Additionally, temporary supply shortages due to massive new markers opening up as the cost drops is completely expected. All the temporary higher prices finance massive production capacity expansion that drops prices in the future. This is a well understood dynamic that we see again and again, even in fossil due production! > Even just one day's worth of storage would mean dedicating 100% of battery production to grid storage for over a century. There are two extreme errors with writing something like this: 1) assuming that battery production stays constant, when it has been growing 10x/5 years, and we are seeing unprecedented demand for new applications. 2) Using primary energy production for comparison to electrified electricity use, when electrified versions of the fossil fuel versions require 3x-4x less electricity. This sort of basic error is as bad as comparing 1GW of solar to 1GW of nuclear without correcting for capacity factor. With reasonable battery production scaling, we will be producing 20-30TWh/year of batteries in a decade. For comparison, it takes more than a decade for us to build a nuclear reactor in the West, so if we are in course to have a fully scaled battery production supply chain for global use, whereas we can't even scale nuclear construction in the US to match the rate at which we will be retiring our aging fleet over the next 20 years. It's time to take a serious look at what carbon-free energy tech is on the table right now and start deploying it as fast as possible, right now, today. At the same time, we should continue research into fanciful ideas like small modular nuclear reactors, in case they pan out. But we need to go to war with the army we have right now.

Manuel_D 4y ago
> It's time to take a serious look at what carbon-free energy tech is on the table right now and start deploying it as fast as possible, right now, today Correct. And with the battery production capacity we have "on the table right now" would take more than a century to produce 24 hours of storage capacity. Assuming that there's going to be massive multiple order-of-magnitude capacity increase is not taking a serious look at the tech we have today, it's a hugely optimistic take on what we might have decades from now. > With reasonable battery production scaling, we will be producing 20-30TWh/year of batteries in a decade. Again, you're literally assuming that battery production figures will increase by 50-80 times within a decade. This is the complete opposite of taking "what we have on the table now", it's assuming that we'll have an industry 50-80 times larger than what we presently have. Moore's law rarely applied to produces outside of semiconductors, because most products hit bottlenecks with inputs. > But we need to go to war with the army we have right now. And again, "the army we have now" would take a century to produce only 16 hours worth for storage for the world via batteries. Actually, it'd take even more than that because after a century global electricity use will have increased substantially as the global south develops and wants amenities like air conditioning. I'm really puzzled by why you chose to close with this statement given that your proposal is to assume that our metaphorical army will be 50-80 times larger by the end of the decade.