It's wishful thinking.
Cost has been high enough that frequency regulation has been the biggest use.
Cost is still high enough that uses from multiple revenue streams will be necessary to fully recoup costs, except in fantastically fucked up markets like where the Tesla battery went in Australia.
But the writing is on the wall. Looking at current usages, and current market penetration, and thinking its reflective of the future is exactly what Palm did when the iPhone came out. Costs are falling exponentially, but the switchover will be happen much faster than the price change once storage is cheaper than its alternatives, it's a non-linearity.
We are already seeing a lot of bids for future solar and wind installs including storage, and then bidding on capacity payments, which is a sea change from even two years ago.
Utilities, if they were more forward looking, could be using this technology switch as an opportunity to massively increase their profits. Unfortunately, nearly all I've heard of are instead living in the past and don't want to accept a world where they have to anticipate advancing and improving technology, and are scared of losing the lobbying power that comes from a tight alliance with fossil fuels. It's perhaps good to have stolid and conservative leadership in something as essential as utilities, but at some point ignoring new tech becomes more dangerous and radical than trying to embrace it.
Again there is a lot of wishful thinking out there but the second you dig into it you realize there is nothing substantial, unfortunately.
You are more than welcome to send me any link to something that is even close to be ready for production and scale. You won't find it.
What you will find is that places like Denmark and Germany cost go up because you need backup in the forms of oil, coal, gas, or nuclear which needs to be factored in.
There is no way around that.
The old AES deployment in Escondido, CA fits 5MWh in a shipping container. Let's say 250MWh per acre, with a single layer of containers.
Or just look at a typical Tesla, which can power the owner's house for several days, using a tiny fraction of their garage. Battery storage can be deployed at substations, at decommissioned thermal-based generators, etc.
I really wonder what sort of political industry rag has been spreading this "energy density" nonsense. If the people saying this were accountable enough for their words to be held to them in five years, they would look rather silly.
I have been accountable for my words for a long time now, more than 5 years. And I have still to see any of your claims come to fruition. Go back 5 years and you will see people claiming what you are claiming now.
It's just not that simple.
We are talking at scale here not just some Tesla projects for the 1st world or a few pilot projects paid for by governments.
Density is a serious issue for any serious storage of energy on top of that getting the energy from the renewables into the storage.
If it wasn't we would be living in a very different world. Economics isn't the problem here, feasibility is and the fact that we don't have any serious examples of what you claim is no problem kind of illustrates the point more than claiming it's a quesiton of conservative utillity execs.
You have zero base for those claims.
Also, what about the AES battery in Escondido, or the Tesla battery in Australia make them not count? What part of "at scale" are you talking about here? An installation of one project that contributes to the grid?
The people that said that batteries were coming five years ago were correct. Deployments are going faster than anticipated, and costs are stopping faster than anticipated.
If these deployments are shy of hitting some barrier that would prevent larger scale deployment, what is that barrier? I contend that the barrier is cost, which is changing all the time. Can you explain to me what barrier you think there is in addition (or in place of) cost? Is it just the politics of decision makers?
You are the one claiming so you need to show how you are going to store enough energy around ex. the US to be able to reliably provide energy from renewable energy sources to everyone that needs it or let's just say 50% of the energy needs (not just electricity).
Electricity is around 20% of the total energy consumption.
The limitation is storing enough energy at a small enough area with enough distribution.
So no, they weren't right at all. We aren't seeing any mass adoption of them only a lot of claims about potential and that is why very few people are investing. Not because they are scared but because there aren't any solutions to some of the foundational problems. That would require new discoveries.
https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/battery...
https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/07/27/141282/the-25-tr...
No, I do not believe I claimed that here. This started with me asking for what physical limit existed for energy storage, a question that you still have not answered. That said, I do believe that a 100% renewable grid AND 100% renewable energy usage is possible, based on the modeling scenarios that have been provided to match renewable production, battery storage, thermal storage, to the seasons and years of recorded weather patterns. So when you say "physics" is the problem but seemingly are unaware of a vast body of academic work that goes counter to your claim, I'm a bit skeptical that you've investigated much here.
>Electricity is around 20% of the total energy consumption.
Not sure what your point is here, but I will take it as an opportunity to point out that electrification of non-electrified energy uses typically requires several factors less energy. The majority of energy "use" is actually energy waste:
Nonetheless, electrification of other sectors presents a huge opportunity for expansion of utilities, and their leadership has been foolish not to pursue this. I see them spouting many of the same falsehoods that you do, so perhaps they have just buried their head in the sand. Since utilities are not a free market, they can get away with doing whatever the hell they want, unfortunately.
> The limitation is storing enough energy at a small enough area with enough distribution.
Thank you for finally at least describing things in physical terms, but this does not imply that current energy densities are an issue with storage, unless you put some rough bounds on "enough energy." Even then, I suspect cost will be an issue FAR before any sort of physical limitation.
>We aren't seeing any mass adoption
Because of costs. And because of regulatory issues. And because of inertia. But for somebody to be "wrong" on this they'd have to claim mass adoption. I don't know of anybody who claimed mass adoption, just drastically falling prices, which has occurred.
New discoveries are not required, just falling costs. As the rather silly article that you link first states:
> But, besides being extremely costly in their current form, the required number of batteries needed to back up intermittent renewables would be astronomical as the above citation for New York City attests
>> “A new battery for a full-size car stores 1 kWh. Running New York City for two cloudy, windless days would require about 530 million such batteries, about 62 per person…”
They are talking about lead acid car batteries here! Not even a Leaf battery! This is, well, to put it kindly, a strawman. This sort of low-quality thought is endemic to the criticism of renewables, because to get a really solid-sounding criticism you have to make up odd scenarios like that.
So lets look at your second article, a much discussed opinion piece, that kind of rests on this part here:
>At current prices, a battery storage system of that size would cost more than $2.5 trillion.
Using "current costs," something that nobody is proposing to do. Also, no comparison for what the cost of the alternative would be, so it's just a big scary number floated as if it were an impossibility just because it's big. If we were to rebuild our current energy infrastructure from scratch, how much would it cost? Certainly far far more than $2.5T. And how much would it cost to build 12 hours worth of energy storage? Certainly far far less than $2.5T. So it's a long opinion piece built just to rile up emotions, with a veneer of quantitative thinking to let people cover up emotional validation of their prior-beliefs with what they think sound like real analysis.
And I remind you again, the complaint in this article isn't a physical impossibility, it isn't energy density, it's cost. The costs are real and high, currently, but that Technology Review piece does not take a full and honest look at them.
We don't know what the future looks like for sure, but batteries will almost certainly be a part of it. If we transition to electric cars from gasoline, most people will have 24-96 hours of energy stored in their garage (because electric cars have a few orders of magnitude more storage than the lead-acid batteries of your first article.) If we allowed people to isalnd their homes from the grid and power them with their EV batteries (something Nissan has been talking about), we'd have TREMENDOUS energy security for everybody, and would almost never have to worry about grid reliability.
The amount of storage in Tesla vehicles shows that, if we are able to build enough batteries for everybody's car transporation, we've already solved the storage problem for residential energy usage. There are still big problems on how to electrify a lot of industry, and air travel, and shipping. But if you're bullish on thorium or fusion, energy sources that are touted for their electricity generation, then you should be equally bullish on renewables and storage being able to do the same.
No one claimed that there won't be battery storage or grids in the future. But the claim that it can somehow be done with renewables is simply flat out factually wrong.
I have already answered with regard to density. Heat is one of them. This is why you don't see any large scale investments ex. from the Chinese either.
It's as simple as that.
The future will still need plenty of gas, oil, nuclear and coal for a long time to go. Renewables will never be able to fill that gab, they are inferior and unreliable.
That's all good stuff and I've been involved in planning out several such installations with utility executives, but the basic question of energy density is always going to dictate whether or not a battery installation can be be scaled up to offset a generator by timeshifting surplus generation to when the load exists for it.
A moderate size city can easily pull GWh. The sum total of all current grid scale installations in California would cover the Western Interconnect for something like .0002 seconds if you handwave transmission.