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"base load power plant" is a meaningless term. Base load is a feature of energy demand. Power plants produce energy, the same power plant might serve peak load,

"base load power plant" is a meaningless term. Base load is a feature of energy demand. Power plants produce energy, the same power plant might serve peak load, base load, or both. EVs are not a solution to energy storage. Even ignoring the challenge of getting people to hook their cars up to the grid, the battery production figures aren't remotely close to what we need. People have been assuming that battery cost will continue to decline exponentially. We'll need a century to provision just 18 hours of battery storage at current rates. Renewable activists hand wave this saying that battery production will increase a hundred fold. In reality, prices are rising: https://about.bnef.com/blog/lithium-ion-battery-pack-prices-rise-for-first-time-to-an-average-of-151-kwh/#:~:text=After%20more%20than%20a%20decade,last%20year%20in%20real%20terms https://about.bnef.com/blog/lithium-ion-battery-pack-prices-....

LarryMullins 4y ago
> People have been assuming that battery cost will continue to decline exponentially. I think the incredible success of the transistor industry has created some very unrealistic expectations about the pace of technological advance more generally. I know this is a fallacy I used to fall for. If a pocket sized computer today can beat out a supercomputer the size of a small building from when I was a kid, anything seems possible. But in reality, the rapid miniaturization of transistors is an extraordinary outlier.
Schroedingersat 4y ago
> We'll need a century to provision just 18 hours of battery storage at current rates. That's a weird way of spelling enough batteries were produced in 2022 alone (about 760GWh) to replace the entire world's nuclear fleet with a renewable mix with minimal overprovision, more flexibility to meet peak demand and a lower forced outage rate. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z > Renewable activists hand wave this saying that battery production will increase a hundred fold. In reality, prices are rising: https://about.bnef.com/blog/lithium-ion-battery-pack-prices- https://about.bnef.com/blog/lithium-ion-battery-pack-prices-.... And this has nothing to do with reserves and everything to do with extraction. The price spike of lithium was a combination of unpredicted demand and the supply dip from covid (because brine ponds take about 3 years to process). Lithium will be irrelevant to grid storage anyway. There are already two GW scale sodium ion factories running and the supply chain CATL is building will completely dwarf them as it is much larger and compatable with the TWh/yr of existing lithium cell production and packaging facilities.

LarryMullins 4y ago

> People have been assuming that battery cost will continue to decline exponentially. I think the incredible success of the transistor industry has created some very unrealistic expectations about the pace of technological advance more generally. I know this is a fallacy I used to fall for. If a pocket sized computer today can beat out a supercomputer the size of a small building from when I was a kid, anything seems possible. But in reality, the rapid miniaturization of transistors is an extraordinary outlier.

Schroedingersat 4y ago

> We'll need a century to provision just 18 hours of battery storage at current rates. That's a weird way of spelling enough batteries were produced in 2022 alone (about 760GWh) to replace the entire world's nuclear fleet with a renewable mix with minimal overprovision, more flexibility to meet peak demand and a lower forced outage rate. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z > Renewable activists hand wave this saying that battery production will increase a hundred fold. In reality, prices are rising: https://about.bnef.com/blog/lithium-ion-battery-pack-prices- https://about.bnef.com/blog/lithium-ion-battery-pack-prices-.... And this has nothing to do with reserves and everything to do with extraction. The price spike of lithium was a combination of unpredicted demand and the supply dip from covid (because brine ponds take about 3 years to process). Lithium will be irrelevant to grid storage anyway. There are already two GW scale sodium ion factories running and the supply chain CATL is building will completely dwarf them as it is much larger and compatable with the TWh/yr of existing lithium cell production and packaging facilities.