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Doubling in 2024 is great but the estimate for 2025 is nowhere near doubling again. How many doublings will we need to store enough energy that solar can replac

Doubling in 2024 is great but the estimate for 2025 is nowhere near doubling again. How many doublings will we need to store enough energy that solar can replace all non-renewables? I imagine it's still a lot. Edit: this page claims we need 84 times what we had in 2022, the estimate for 2024 is ~3x higher, so call it ~5 more doublings after this year. https://www.alsym.com/blog/how-much-energy-storage-do-we-need-for-a-completely-clean-u-s-electric-grid/ https://www.alsym.com/blog/how-much-energy-storage-do-we-nee...

colechristensen 3y ago
The opposite needs to happen, industry needs to adjust to taking advantage of regular daily energy price swings. Plenty of industries can. Instantaneous pricing for electricity motivates people and industry to make better choices. Very cheap energy will enable interesting things too.
- adrianN 3y ago
  Realistically both things will need to happen. There is a lot of demand that can’t be time shifted by more than a few hours. We need storage for a few weeks of consumption eventually.
- ssl-3 3y ago
  Indeed. As a consumer in Ohio, variable-rate pricing kind of scares me: It's nice to be able to run the clothes dryer without any concern over what time of day it is. We don't do variable-rate pricing here (at least for residential users). But I'd manage to sort it out in pretty short order, I think: It usually isn't very important to me what time of day the clothes get dried (as long as they don't sit long enough to get stinky), so I would indeed be motivated to pay attention to that. I, myself, would even become motivated to automate it so that the clothes begin drying automatically when energy is [relatively] cheap. I can also imagine things like automating water heating: Burn Joules when it is cheap to do so, and store [most of] them for later use at a time that may be more convenient to me. (The math gets interesting on this one.) Having very cheap energy be available occasionally would also be neat: I've got computationally-intensive tasks that need to get done some day. These cost real money to run on the hardware that I have. It sure would be nice if I could save some money by only doing these tasks when power is cheaper. (Right now, I do try to optimize timing them for energy efficiency. For instance, in the summer it is cheaper to run them on cool nights when the windows might be open than during a hot, sunny day when the aircon might barely be keeping up.)
7e 3y ago
Storing even 10% of US electricity usage from summer to winter could be in the tens of trillions of dollars. Spending $10,000 to store $2 of electricity in a battery is not scalable. Other forms of energy storage are the future.

colechristensen 3y ago

The opposite needs to happen, industry needs to adjust to taking advantage of regular daily energy price swings. Plenty of industries can. Instantaneous pricing for electricity motivates people and industry to make better choices. Very cheap energy will enable interesting things too.

adrianN 3y ago
Realistically both things will need to happen. There is a lot of demand that can’t be time shifted by more than a few hours. We need storage for a few weeks of consumption eventually.
ssl-3 3y ago
Indeed. As a consumer in Ohio, variable-rate pricing kind of scares me: It's nice to be able to run the clothes dryer without any concern over what time of day it is. We don't do variable-rate pricing here (at least for residential users). But I'd manage to sort it out in pretty short order, I think: It usually isn't very important to me what time of day the clothes get dried (as long as they don't sit long enough to get stinky), so I would indeed be motivated to pay attention to that. I, myself, would even become motivated to automate it so that the clothes begin drying automatically when energy is [relatively] cheap. I can also imagine things like automating water heating: Burn Joules when it is cheap to do so, and store [most of] them for later use at a time that may be more convenient to me. (The math gets interesting on this one.) Having very cheap energy be available occasionally would also be neat: I've got computationally-intensive tasks that need to get done some day. These cost real money to run on the hardware that I have. It sure would be nice if I could save some money by only doing these tasks when power is cheaper. (Right now, I do try to optimize timing them for energy efficiency. For instance, in the summer it is cheaper to run them on cool nights when the windows might be open than during a hot, sunny day when the aircon might barely be keeping up.)

7e 3y ago

Storing even 10% of US electricity usage from summer to winter could be in the tens of trillions of dollars. Spending $10,000 to store $2 of electricity in a battery is not scalable. Other forms of energy storage are the future.