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Global battery manufacturing capacity was 2,600GWh in 2023 [1], and has probably already exceeded that this year. The IEA projects closer to 4TWh by 2025, and n

Global battery manufacturing capacity was 2,600GWh in 2023 [1], and has probably already exceeded that this year. The IEA projects closer to 4TWh by 2025, and nearly 7TWh by 2030 [2]. You need to pay attention because this is happening fast. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-04-12/china-already-makes-as-many-batteries-as-the-entire-world-wants https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-04-12/china-... [2] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/lithium-ion-battery-manufacturing-capacity-2022-2030 https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/lithium-ion-b...

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> nearly 7TWh by 2030 That's a big number. Here's a bigger one: 30,000 TWh, about our current electricity consumption [1]. 7 TWh in 2030 is less than 1/4,000th total electriciy production today. (You obviously don't need 1:1 coverage. But 2 hours in 2030 against a year's demand today is still a nudge.) Now consider EVs. Then add the tens of TWh of annual power demand AI is expected to add to power demand [2]. (And I'm assuming a free market for battery cells, which obviously isn't where we're heading. So add local production bottlenecks to the mix.) Battery numbers are going up. But they aren't going up fast enough and never could have, not unless we ditch electrifying transportation. Nukes or gas. Anyone pretending there is a third way is defaulting to one or the other. [1] https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-information-overview/electricity-production https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-information-overview... [2] https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/AI-poised-to-drive-160-increase-in-power-demand https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/AI-poised-to-...
- UltraSane 2y ago
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- lukeschlather 2y ago
  > and never could have I could just as easily assert the same of nuclear or gas. It doesn't make it true, although there seems to be evidence that nuclear cannot scale as fast as batteries/solar/wind.
- countvonbalzac 2y ago
  That's per year right?
- Vvector 2y ago
  "But 2 hours in 2030 against a year's demand today is still a nudge." How much battery storage do you think we need? Surely not a year's worth. For solar, we'd likely need 10-16 hours of storage to power stuff overnight. Maybe a little more to cover a few cloudy days. Sounds like we are about 5% of that now?
  - sudosysgen 2y ago
    10-16 hours is not enough at all. On a cloudy day, solar output will only be 15-20%. On top of that, your panels really only generate for 8 hours on a very good day - the sun is a lot dimmer in the early morning and late evening. Really, you need 2x storage for a good day, if you want to deal with two cloudy days you'd want 50-60 hours of storage.
    - ckdarby 2y ago
      Could you possibly read the article you're replying to again? Even skimming through it discusses the coverage of wind and a not 50/50 system particularly to cover winter & night time. There is also discussion of a ~2% from "other" and how much storage capacity is required. The article even goes into using wind & solar data for the simulation and reducing further the output to be conservative.
      - sudosysgen 2y ago
        I obviously understand it's not a 100% solar system. If it was you would need to be able to deal with at least 2 weeks of bad weather, not two days, and you would have to take into account winter (dropping to about 5 hours instead of 8). Additionally, mixing solar and wind is not as easy as it seems, because the two are correlated. If you have a major storm that makes wind energy impossible due to wind speeds above ~100km/h, you will also have clouds making solar energy unworkable. I'm not aware of any simulations modelling a 95+% solar/wind grid for storage needs, taking into account extreme weather patterns, grid topology, and equipment damage, but if you do then please link it. I don't see any article linked in the comment I replied to. Perhaps you're mixing up two comment chains.
    - 2y ago
- ViewTrick1002 2y ago
  5 hours of storage and a 98.6% renewables system. https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewable-grid-is-readily-achievable-and-affordable/ https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewable-gr... Investing in nuclear power today is an insane prospect when the energy market is being reshaped at this speed. In Europe old paid off nuclear plants are regularly being forced off the markets due to supplying too expensive energy. This will only worsen the nuclear business case as renewable expansion continues, today being a bonanza fueled by finally finding an energy source cheaper than fossil fuel. Nuclear power is essentially pissing against the wind hoping the 1960s returns.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > nuclear power today is an insane prospect when the energy market is being reshaped at this speed We’re still more than a decade away from having enough batteries to make this shift. Again, excluding EVs and AI. That’s why we’re reänimating coal plants and building new gas turbines. I’d also love to see the numbers on that simulation going from 98.6% coverage to what we expect from a modern grid. (And if the balance is provided by gas or something else.) It should surprise nobody that going from 1 sigma to 2 can cost as much as 2 to 3, even if the percentage gap is much smaller. > Europe old paid off nuclear plants are regularly being forced off the markets due to supplying too expensive energy Europe has invested €1.5tn into new gas infrastructure. That doesn’t go poor without a fight and collateral damage.
    - ViewTrick1002 2y ago
      A study recently found that a nuclear powered grid to be vastly more expensive than a renewable grid when looking at total system cost. Nuclear power needs to come down by 85% in cost to be equal to the renewable system. Every dollar invested in nuclear today prolongs our reliance on fossil fuels. We get enormously more value of the money simply by building renewables. The study finds that investments in flexibility in the electricity supply are needed in both systems due to the constant production pattern of nuclear and the variability of renewable energy sources. However, the scenario with high nuclear implementation is 1.2 billion EUR more expensive annually compared to a scenario only based on renewables, with all systems completely balancing supply and demand across all energy sectors in every hour. For nuclear power to be cost competitive with renewables an investment cost of 1.55 MEUR/MW must be achieved, which is substantially below any cost projection for nuclear power. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261924010882 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626192...
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  We'll figure it out. There is too much at stake and there are already a gazillion engineers out there going to bed every night thinking about how to solve this problem. Innovation is the grim reaper of analyst reports. No one at my company notifies an investment bank when we have a breakthrough internally (lol).
- amluto 2y ago
  > That's a big number. Here's a bigger one: 30,000 TWh, about our current electricity consumption [1]. 7 TWh in 2030 is less than 1/4,000th total electriciy production today. I don’t think anyone is seriously suggesting powering a portion of the grid with batteries that are cycled once per year. One can optimistically cycle one or even twice a day (if wind peaks when the sun is down). Or you can try to ride through a week of bad weather, but natural gas is not actually a terrible solution for that. And those batteries last for a lot longer than a year. So I think your 1/4000 should be more like 1/10. Give it a few more years.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > natural gas is not actually a terrible solution Natural gas is a great solution. It's why we're using it. But if your focus is decarbonisation and electrification, nuclear is better. Even if it's pricier. > your 1/4000 should be more like 1/10. Give it a few more years The former is calculated from projected 2030 battery production to present energy levels. An essential component of strategy is knowing on whose side time is. Battery production won't reach 1/10 for at least a few decades. That's the point. We need an intermediate solution, and if that's going to be gas, we have to live with the fact that (a) emissions will continue and (b) we perpetuate trillions of dollars of capital infrastructure that will be as difficult to take down in the future as coal has been today.
    - Dylan16807 2y ago
      > Natural gas is a great solution. It's why we're using it. But if your focus is decarbonisation and electrification, nuclear is better. Even if it's pricier. There's a crossover point. If you use natural gas to provide <1% of yearly electricity needs, and you save a zillion dollars while doing so, you can find cheaper ways to decarbonize by the same amount.
    - amluto 2y ago
      > Natural gas is a great solution. It's why we're using it. But if your focus is decarbonisation and electrification, nuclear is better. Even if it's pricier. If you come up with some combination of carbon-free energy sources and storage that covers 90% of grid energy needs, and you need to fill in the gap, and that gap is a whole lot of power but only for a handful of days a year, then I don’t think nuclear is a good option at all to fill in the gap. The capital expense would be absurd. Decarbonization is great, but in the real world, decarbonization per dollar spent is what matters. Instead of spending a zillion dollars on nuclear peaker plants, spend a lot fewer dollars on gas peaker plants and the the rest for more effective environmental improvements.
- reitzensteinm 2y ago
  Why are you comparing the rate of change of battery storage capacity, the vast majority of which if grid connected will be used for at most diurnal storage, to yearly energy consumption? Holy mother of all type errors there. Multiply it by 365, and it implies that in 2030 alone, we will create enough battery storage to time shift almost 10% of our total electricity use today. This is not a stat that should inspire pessimism.
- robbiep 2y ago
  I had to check the numbers because it grabbed my attention. No issue with your quoted figure of 30,000 TWh (annual) global electricity consumption. But we only need to do 7TWh of battery supply in year 1 (or say only 1-2 of that makes it to grid storage). 30,000/365 is 82 TWh daily. So that’s the number to crack, surely? Because a significant percentage of storage will be to make up for wind and solar, which generally approximately follows some sort of diurnal cycle? If we will be closing in on a couple TWh annual storage capacity in 6 years (leaving aside any real synchronised attempt to get vehicles to be part of large scale distributed grids) then only a few years on from 2030 we’re going to be able to store a significant percentage of our daily energy demands

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

> nearly 7TWh by 2030 That's a big number. Here's a bigger one: 30,000 TWh, about our current electricity consumption [1]. 7 TWh in 2030 is less than 1/4,000th total electriciy production today. (You obviously don't need 1:1 coverage. But 2 hours in 2030 against a year's demand today is still a nudge.) Now consider EVs. Then add the tens of TWh of annual power demand AI is expected to add to power demand [2]. (And I'm assuming a free market for battery cells, which obviously isn't where we're heading. So add local production bottlenecks to the mix.) Battery numbers are going up. But they aren't going up fast enough and never could have, not unless we ditch electrifying transportation. Nukes or gas. Anyone pretending there is a third way is defaulting to one or the other. [1] https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-information-overview/electricity-production https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-information-overview... [2] https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/AI-poised-to-drive-160-increase-in-power-demand https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/AI-poised-to-...

UltraSane 2y ago
[dead]
lukeschlather 2y ago
> and never could have I could just as easily assert the same of nuclear or gas. It doesn't make it true, although there seems to be evidence that nuclear cannot scale as fast as batteries/solar/wind.
countvonbalzac 2y ago
That's per year right?
Vvector 2y ago
"But 2 hours in 2030 against a year's demand today is still a nudge." How much battery storage do you think we need? Surely not a year's worth. For solar, we'd likely need 10-16 hours of storage to power stuff overnight. Maybe a little more to cover a few cloudy days. Sounds like we are about 5% of that now?
- sudosysgen 2y ago
  10-16 hours is not enough at all. On a cloudy day, solar output will only be 15-20%. On top of that, your panels really only generate for 8 hours on a very good day - the sun is a lot dimmer in the early morning and late evening. Really, you need 2x storage for a good day, if you want to deal with two cloudy days you'd want 50-60 hours of storage.
  - ckdarby 2y ago
    Could you possibly read the article you're replying to again? Even skimming through it discusses the coverage of wind and a not 50/50 system particularly to cover winter & night time. There is also discussion of a ~2% from "other" and how much storage capacity is required. The article even goes into using wind & solar data for the simulation and reducing further the output to be conservative.
    - sudosysgen 2y ago
      I obviously understand it's not a 100% solar system. If it was you would need to be able to deal with at least 2 weeks of bad weather, not two days, and you would have to take into account winter (dropping to about 5 hours instead of 8). Additionally, mixing solar and wind is not as easy as it seems, because the two are correlated. If you have a major storm that makes wind energy impossible due to wind speeds above ~100km/h, you will also have clouds making solar energy unworkable. I'm not aware of any simulations modelling a 95+% solar/wind grid for storage needs, taking into account extreme weather patterns, grid topology, and equipment damage, but if you do then please link it. I don't see any article linked in the comment I replied to. Perhaps you're mixing up two comment chains.
  - 2y ago
ViewTrick1002 2y ago
5 hours of storage and a 98.6% renewables system. https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewable-grid-is-readily-achievable-and-affordable/ https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewable-gr... Investing in nuclear power today is an insane prospect when the energy market is being reshaped at this speed. In Europe old paid off nuclear plants are regularly being forced off the markets due to supplying too expensive energy. This will only worsen the nuclear business case as renewable expansion continues, today being a bonanza fueled by finally finding an energy source cheaper than fossil fuel. Nuclear power is essentially pissing against the wind hoping the 1960s returns.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > nuclear power today is an insane prospect when the energy market is being reshaped at this speed We’re still more than a decade away from having enough batteries to make this shift. Again, excluding EVs and AI. That’s why we’re reänimating coal plants and building new gas turbines. I’d also love to see the numbers on that simulation going from 98.6% coverage to what we expect from a modern grid. (And if the balance is provided by gas or something else.) It should surprise nobody that going from 1 sigma to 2 can cost as much as 2 to 3, even if the percentage gap is much smaller. > Europe old paid off nuclear plants are regularly being forced off the markets due to supplying too expensive energy Europe has invested €1.5tn into new gas infrastructure. That doesn’t go poor without a fight and collateral damage.
  - ViewTrick1002 2y ago
    A study recently found that a nuclear powered grid to be vastly more expensive than a renewable grid when looking at total system cost. Nuclear power needs to come down by 85% in cost to be equal to the renewable system. Every dollar invested in nuclear today prolongs our reliance on fossil fuels. We get enormously more value of the money simply by building renewables. The study finds that investments in flexibility in the electricity supply are needed in both systems due to the constant production pattern of nuclear and the variability of renewable energy sources. However, the scenario with high nuclear implementation is 1.2 billion EUR more expensive annually compared to a scenario only based on renewables, with all systems completely balancing supply and demand across all energy sectors in every hour. For nuclear power to be cost competitive with renewables an investment cost of 1.55 MEUR/MW must be achieved, which is substantially below any cost projection for nuclear power. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261924010882 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626192...
Workaccount2 2y ago
We'll figure it out. There is too much at stake and there are already a gazillion engineers out there going to bed every night thinking about how to solve this problem. Innovation is the grim reaper of analyst reports. No one at my company notifies an investment bank when we have a breakthrough internally (lol).
amluto 2y ago
> That's a big number. Here's a bigger one: 30,000 TWh, about our current electricity consumption [1]. 7 TWh in 2030 is less than 1/4,000th total electriciy production today. I don’t think anyone is seriously suggesting powering a portion of the grid with batteries that are cycled once per year. One can optimistically cycle one or even twice a day (if wind peaks when the sun is down). Or you can try to ride through a week of bad weather, but natural gas is not actually a terrible solution for that. And those batteries last for a lot longer than a year. So I think your 1/4000 should be more like 1/10. Give it a few more years.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > natural gas is not actually a terrible solution Natural gas is a great solution. It's why we're using it. But if your focus is decarbonisation and electrification, nuclear is better. Even if it's pricier. > your 1/4000 should be more like 1/10. Give it a few more years The former is calculated from projected 2030 battery production to present energy levels. An essential component of strategy is knowing on whose side time is. Battery production won't reach 1/10 for at least a few decades. That's the point. We need an intermediate solution, and if that's going to be gas, we have to live with the fact that (a) emissions will continue and (b) we perpetuate trillions of dollars of capital infrastructure that will be as difficult to take down in the future as coal has been today.
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    > Natural gas is a great solution. It's why we're using it. But if your focus is decarbonisation and electrification, nuclear is better. Even if it's pricier. There's a crossover point. If you use natural gas to provide <1% of yearly electricity needs, and you save a zillion dollars while doing so, you can find cheaper ways to decarbonize by the same amount.
  - amluto 2y ago
    > Natural gas is a great solution. It's why we're using it. But if your focus is decarbonisation and electrification, nuclear is better. Even if it's pricier. If you come up with some combination of carbon-free energy sources and storage that covers 90% of grid energy needs, and you need to fill in the gap, and that gap is a whole lot of power but only for a handful of days a year, then I don’t think nuclear is a good option at all to fill in the gap. The capital expense would be absurd. Decarbonization is great, but in the real world, decarbonization per dollar spent is what matters. Instead of spending a zillion dollars on nuclear peaker plants, spend a lot fewer dollars on gas peaker plants and the the rest for more effective environmental improvements.
reitzensteinm 2y ago
Why are you comparing the rate of change of battery storage capacity, the vast majority of which if grid connected will be used for at most diurnal storage, to yearly energy consumption? Holy mother of all type errors there. Multiply it by 365, and it implies that in 2030 alone, we will create enough battery storage to time shift almost 10% of our total electricity use today. This is not a stat that should inspire pessimism.
robbiep 2y ago
I had to check the numbers because it grabbed my attention. No issue with your quoted figure of 30,000 TWh (annual) global electricity consumption. But we only need to do 7TWh of battery supply in year 1 (or say only 1-2 of that makes it to grid storage). 30,000/365 is 82 TWh daily. So that’s the number to crack, surely? Because a significant percentage of storage will be to make up for wind and solar, which generally approximately follows some sort of diurnal cycle? If we will be closing in on a couple TWh annual storage capacity in 6 years (leaving aside any real synchronised attempt to get vehicles to be part of large scale distributed grids) then only a few years on from 2030 we’re going to be able to store a significant percentage of our daily energy demands