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Exactly. I wouldn't call this article very balanced. It actually is perpetuating a lot of myths about lithium ion batteries popular with the anti renewables pro

Exactly. I wouldn't call this article very balanced. It actually is perpetuating a lot of myths about lithium ion batteries popular with the anti renewables pro fossil fuel crowds. It opens emphasizing the scarcity of lithium. It's actually one of the more common elements on this planet. There is no shortage. We're not going to run out. It's literally everywhere and we've barely scratched the surface looking for rich deposits of it. There are indeed several viable ways to store energy that don't involve using lithium at all. Flammability is of course called out as well. Never mind that most car and truck fires are good old ICE vehicles. Battery electric fires are so rare that most fire men will never deal with one in their careers. Very much unlike ICE car fires which they deal with on a daily basis. And never mind that there are lots of very safe lithium ion batteries now. LFP is pretty safe for example. Calling out long duration storage is another red flag. How much of that is needed? In giga watt hours please. Nobody ever bothers to qualify that. It's just asserted that we need stupendous amounts of it and insinuated that we'd need to bankrupt the planet getting it. As soon as you put numbers on it, it turns into a simple logistics problem. Oh we need X amount of batteries and it's going to cost Y amount of dollars. And of course while people seem to assume that we need stupendous amounts of it we are actually witnessing the effects that very little amounts of short term storage are having already on the electricity markets. It's wiping out coal and gas plants as a viable way to generate power economically. Short term energy storage is a lot cheaper and apparently removing all these plants is not causing any issues as we have still got way more base load than we need. That's another thing that is rarely qualified with a number. A lot of coal and gas plants are facing early closures because of batteries. Modern gas plants designed to run for many decades that came online only recently are already being replaced by short term battery storage. It's simply cheaper and gas is expensive. With relatively predictable and stable daily cycles of peaks and dips in renewable energy production, short term storage is covering most of what we need. Batteries are now being produced at a rate measured in TWH per year. Most of those batteries are kept at a high charge rate most of the time. That's a huge amount of untapped potential energy. It's cumulatively going to amount to hundreds of twh of stored energy that we have just sitting there in batteries designed for short term storage distributed all over the place. That's an enormous buffer of energy expanding every year. Only a small fraction of that is cycled on a daily basis.

JackSlateur 2y ago
I've witnessed this already at the office .. Battery electric fires are so rare that most fire men will never deal with one in their careers.
h0l0cube 2y ago
> Batteries are now being produced at a rate measured in TWH per year I don't disagree with you, but I think specifically lithium batteries for storage is going to be a small part of the picture as we move towards having larger capacity. Sodium ion batteries in particular remove the resource bottlenecks that still hold back battery storage. That said, yearly additions to grid-scale battery storage (of any type) is basically doubling every year. https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/annual-grid-scale-battery-storage-additions-2017-2022 https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/annual-grid-s... https://www.iea.org/reports/batteries-and-secure-energy-transitions/executive-summary https://www.iea.org/reports/batteries-and-secure-energy-tran... To the point, that by some very basic projections I made, it looks like there will be more battery capacity than daily solar generation by 2034, and then more capacity than daily usage less than a year later. https://www.desmos.com/calculator/lunahw7gvo https://www.desmos.com/calculator/lunahw7gvo
- jillesvangurp 2y ago
  Especially for grid storage sodium ion is looking very promising. As are several other chemistries. But most of the current production is still lithium based for now and it will take time for that to change. I would say non lithium storage might become dominant from the mid 2030s and onward. As for battery capacity. There will indeed be way more batteries than energy generation. But that's only a problem if you assume all those batteries are being cycled to capacity continuously. IMHO that's actually not the case. Most car batteries don't get drained on a daily basis. It's more like once a week or two weeks for average drivers. Same with grid batteries. They are used more intensively of course but also oversized so they don't constantly run out. My point was that most batteries are, on average, holding a charge that's probably close to fully charged (or 80%, which is more optimal for some battery chemistries) and that only fraction of that aggregate capacity is discharged and recharged on a daily basis. Having that much batteries is really good news. IMHO it's a trend that will accelerate as batteries continue to get cheaper. We'll just buy more of them and find more places where it's nice to have them. Think of an e.g. AC units with a battery that can charge during the day and discharge in the evening. As for the IEA, take their numbers with a grain of salt. They are notorious for having to correct their own predictions regularly. And there are some well known issues with their modeling and assumptions. Generally, you can subtract at least a few years from most of their predictions. I'd recommend reading some of the reports by Bloomberg NEF they've had a few interesting reports on investments for battery production. Apparently we can look forward to over production and price drops next year already.

JackSlateur 2y ago

I've witnessed this already at the office .. Battery electric fires are so rare that most fire men will never deal with one in their careers.

h0l0cube 2y ago

> Batteries are now being produced at a rate measured in TWH per year I don't disagree with you, but I think specifically lithium batteries for storage is going to be a small part of the picture as we move towards having larger capacity. Sodium ion batteries in particular remove the resource bottlenecks that still hold back battery storage. That said, yearly additions to grid-scale battery storage (of any type) is basically doubling every year. https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/annual-grid-scale-battery-storage-additions-2017-2022 https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/annual-grid-s... https://www.iea.org/reports/batteries-and-secure-energy-transitions/executive-summary https://www.iea.org/reports/batteries-and-secure-energy-tran... To the point, that by some very basic projections I made, it looks like there will be more battery capacity than daily solar generation by 2034, and then more capacity than daily usage less than a year later. https://www.desmos.com/calculator/lunahw7gvo https://www.desmos.com/calculator/lunahw7gvo

jillesvangurp 2y ago
Especially for grid storage sodium ion is looking very promising. As are several other chemistries. But most of the current production is still lithium based for now and it will take time for that to change. I would say non lithium storage might become dominant from the mid 2030s and onward. As for battery capacity. There will indeed be way more batteries than energy generation. But that's only a problem if you assume all those batteries are being cycled to capacity continuously. IMHO that's actually not the case. Most car batteries don't get drained on a daily basis. It's more like once a week or two weeks for average drivers. Same with grid batteries. They are used more intensively of course but also oversized so they don't constantly run out. My point was that most batteries are, on average, holding a charge that's probably close to fully charged (or 80%, which is more optimal for some battery chemistries) and that only fraction of that aggregate capacity is discharged and recharged on a daily basis. Having that much batteries is really good news. IMHO it's a trend that will accelerate as batteries continue to get cheaper. We'll just buy more of them and find more places where it's nice to have them. Think of an e.g. AC units with a battery that can charge during the day and discharge in the evening. As for the IEA, take their numbers with a grain of salt. They are notorious for having to correct their own predictions regularly. And there are some well known issues with their modeling and assumptions. Generally, you can subtract at least a few years from most of their predictions. I'd recommend reading some of the reports by Bloomberg NEF they've had a few interesting reports on investments for battery production. Apparently we can look forward to over production and price drops next year already.