5 ms·

> You need to have batteries that can store power for at least a week to have base load as reliable as nuclear power. This is a complete myth, somebody pulled

> You need to have batteries that can store power for at least a week to have base load as reliable as nuclear power. This is a complete myth, somebody pulled "a week" out of their butt a decade ago, it gets repeated a ton, but it's not based on reality or studies or numbers. This is a consistent problem with online nuclear advocacy: there's no basis for the numbers, nobody calculates anything, and if they bother to do a calculation they only calculate the upper bound and then assert "see look a big number" and say that's a proof of impossibility. What event requires a week of storage? Nobody can name one! When has there been a week with zero generation? No one can name it! The assumptions that one has to make up in order to make a "week" even sound plausible are in turn themselves so implausible. > There isn't enough battery capacity in the world to do this for a state like California, let alone the whole country. Imagining there's a fixed battery capacity is a very short sighted view, it's growing by 10x every year. So let's take your "week" as the measure, even though it's wrong. If we're at 2-3 TWh of world battery production capacity in 2025, that's 4 days of California demand. By 2031 or 2032, we're going to have 20-30TWh of battery production.

dahart 6mo ago
> By 2031 or 2032, we’re going to have 20-30TWh of battery production What’s the source on this? I just googled it, and the sources I see are saying 5TWh by 2036, with increasing supply chain risks over time… https://finance.yahoo.com/news/global-lithium-ion-battery-capacity-134000198.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/global-lithium-ion-battery-ca... https://www.iea.org/commentaries/global-battery-markets-are-growing-strongly-and-so-are-the-supply-risks https://www.iea.org/commentaries/global-battery-markets-are-...
- epistasis 6mo ago
  Projection from past performance. There are two types of predictions when it comes to solar and storage: 1) naive, exponential, and correct, or 2) expert, with unexplained fudge factors, and wrong. What you'll see published in PR releases will be from "experts". Even Jenny Chase at Bloomberg NEF points out how "experts" always underestimate performance, and then goes and does it herself with her own projections. I heard the projection on a podcast from a battery builder (maybe Form Energy's CEO?) in 2021 that we were at 200-300 GWh in 2021, and would have 2-3 TWh 2026, and 20-30 TWh in 2031. His "naive" prediction was correct, all the other projections have been flat wrong. Another example, sci fi author Ramez Naam in 2020 reviewed his prior projections from 2011 and 2015 here: https://www.rameznaam.com/p/solars-future-is-insanely-cheap-2020 https://www.rameznaam.com/p/solars-future-is-insanely-cheap-...
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
Manuel_D 6mo ago
> If we're at 2-3 TWh of world battery production capacity in 2025, that's 4 days of California demand. By 2031 or 2032, we're going to have 20-30TWh of battery production. The 2,200 GWh of batteries produced in 2025 amounts to a bit under 3 days of California's average 750GWh daily electricity consumption, not 4 days. And more broadly, I'm not sure how pointing out that a year's worth of global battery production amounts to just 3 days of one US state's electricity demand is supposed to demonstrate that battery storage is feasible. To put this in perspective, global daily electricity demand is 60,000 GWh. Of the ~2,200 GWh of batteries produced in 2025, only ~300 GWh was used for grid storage. Most of it went to EVs. Battery production costs are already dominated by the cost of anode and cathode material. The bottleneck is resource extraction. And the nature of scaling resource extraction is that the easiest-to-exploit reserves are extracted first, and increasing producing involves reaching for the more and more difficult to access reserves. Even if production continues to rise, any serious investment into battery grid storage will delay EV adoption as batteries are diverted to grid storage instead of EVs.
- epistasis 6mo ago
  > I'm not sure how pointing out that a year's worth of global battery production amounts to just 3 days of one US state's electricity demand is supposed to demonstrate that battery storage is feasible. It was pointing out that the comment making off-the-wall requirements of battery storage was already not aware of the order of magnitude of existing batteries. You don't know the exact > To put this in perspective, global daily electricity demand is 60,000 GWh. Of the ~2,200 GWh of batteries produced in 2025, only ~300 GWh was used for grid storage. Most of it went to EVs. What's your implication here? If you are trying to say this means that batteries can never scale, it's certainly not making that point. Even the distinction between grid and EVs is immaterial, because where do EVs get their power? The grid. That's all flexible demand, that can be shifted a huge amount. > Battery production costs are already dominated by the cost of anode and cathode material. The bottleneck is resource extraction. And the nature of scaling resource extraction is that the easiest-to-exploit reserves are extracted first, and increasing producing involves reaching for the more and more difficult to access reserves. The implication seems to be that batteries will get more expensive at some point. Perhaps. Or more chemistries will be discovered or used. Lithium got very expensive for a short while, then cheap. The cure for high prices is high prices, because unlike oil there are tons of substitutions available for all aspects of batteries. Unlike oil, we are in the early days of discovery for battery materials, because we never looked for them before. Just recently fracking in the southeast quarter of the US turned out to be producing a fair amount of lithium, which nobody had bothered to even investigate before. Batteries are a new technology, not an old technology like oil, and the dynamics are far different. One can't simply recycle reasoning that applies in oil without examining the first princiles. > Even if production continues to rise, any serious investment into battery grid storage will delay EV adoption as batteries are diverted to grid storage instead of EVs. "Even if" is a preposterous thing to say, of course it will! EVs are higher value destination for grid batteries, so more batteries will go towards that right now. And as long as there might be "diversion" as you say, there is need for more production capacity, and production capacity will expand.

dahart 6mo ago

> By 2031 or 2032, we’re going to have 20-30TWh of battery production What’s the source on this? I just googled it, and the sources I see are saying 5TWh by 2036, with increasing supply chain risks over time… https://finance.yahoo.com/news/global-lithium-ion-battery-capacity-134000198.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/global-lithium-ion-battery-ca... https://www.iea.org/commentaries/global-battery-markets-are-growing-strongly-and-so-are-the-supply-risks https://www.iea.org/commentaries/global-battery-markets-are-...

epistasis 6mo ago
Projection from past performance. There are two types of predictions when it comes to solar and storage: 1) naive, exponential, and correct, or 2) expert, with unexplained fudge factors, and wrong. What you'll see published in PR releases will be from "experts". Even Jenny Chase at Bloomberg NEF points out how "experts" always underestimate performance, and then goes and does it herself with her own projections. I heard the projection on a podcast from a battery builder (maybe Form Energy's CEO?) in 2021 that we were at 200-300 GWh in 2021, and would have 2-3 TWh 2026, and 20-30 TWh in 2031. His "naive" prediction was correct, all the other projections have been flat wrong. Another example, sci fi author Ramez Naam in 2020 reviewed his prior projections from 2011 and 2015 here: https://www.rameznaam.com/p/solars-future-is-insanely-cheap-2020 https://www.rameznaam.com/p/solars-future-is-insanely-cheap-...
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]

Manuel_D 6mo ago

> If we're at 2-3 TWh of world battery production capacity in 2025, that's 4 days of California demand. By 2031 or 2032, we're going to have 20-30TWh of battery production. The 2,200 GWh of batteries produced in 2025 amounts to a bit under 3 days of California's average 750GWh daily electricity consumption, not 4 days. And more broadly, I'm not sure how pointing out that a year's worth of global battery production amounts to just 3 days of one US state's electricity demand is supposed to demonstrate that battery storage is feasible. To put this in perspective, global daily electricity demand is 60,000 GWh. Of the ~2,200 GWh of batteries produced in 2025, only ~300 GWh was used for grid storage. Most of it went to EVs. Battery production costs are already dominated by the cost of anode and cathode material. The bottleneck is resource extraction. And the nature of scaling resource extraction is that the easiest-to-exploit reserves are extracted first, and increasing producing involves reaching for the more and more difficult to access reserves. Even if production continues to rise, any serious investment into battery grid storage will delay EV adoption as batteries are diverted to grid storage instead of EVs.

epistasis 6mo ago
> I'm not sure how pointing out that a year's worth of global battery production amounts to just 3 days of one US state's electricity demand is supposed to demonstrate that battery storage is feasible. It was pointing out that the comment making off-the-wall requirements of battery storage was already not aware of the order of magnitude of existing batteries. You don't know the exact > To put this in perspective, global daily electricity demand is 60,000 GWh. Of the ~2,200 GWh of batteries produced in 2025, only ~300 GWh was used for grid storage. Most of it went to EVs. What's your implication here? If you are trying to say this means that batteries can never scale, it's certainly not making that point. Even the distinction between grid and EVs is immaterial, because where do EVs get their power? The grid. That's all flexible demand, that can be shifted a huge amount. > Battery production costs are already dominated by the cost of anode and cathode material. The bottleneck is resource extraction. And the nature of scaling resource extraction is that the easiest-to-exploit reserves are extracted first, and increasing producing involves reaching for the more and more difficult to access reserves. The implication seems to be that batteries will get more expensive at some point. Perhaps. Or more chemistries will be discovered or used. Lithium got very expensive for a short while, then cheap. The cure for high prices is high prices, because unlike oil there are tons of substitutions available for all aspects of batteries. Unlike oil, we are in the early days of discovery for battery materials, because we never looked for them before. Just recently fracking in the southeast quarter of the US turned out to be producing a fair amount of lithium, which nobody had bothered to even investigate before. Batteries are a new technology, not an old technology like oil, and the dynamics are far different. One can't simply recycle reasoning that applies in oil without examining the first princiles. > Even if production continues to rise, any serious investment into battery grid storage will delay EV adoption as batteries are diverted to grid storage instead of EVs. "Even if" is a preposterous thing to say, of course it will! EVs are higher value destination for grid batteries, so more batteries will go towards that right now. And as long as there might be "diversion" as you say, there is need for more production capacity, and production capacity will expand.