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A comment on Wind and solar are cheaper than thought, admits UK government. Parent comment

Re:Wind and solar are cheaper than thought, admits UK govern... by UseStrict on Thursday August 27, 2020 @04:23PM (#24298206)
That's a fairly old statistic to pick, not sure if it was intentional or not, but the reality is lithium battery production has grown significantly since 2016 and shows no signs of stopping. The largest manufacturer in China, CATL is estimated to grow its capacity beyond 307GWh by 2028 [2].

"In 2019, LG Chem had the most lithium battery production capacity at over 50 GWh. LG Chem [is] increasing EV battery production capacity to as much as 110GWh by the end of 2020."

The design of a modern grid with battery storage would change as well - no reason to have singular giant storage plants. A mixture of solar, wind, and hydroelectric with distributed storage doesn't need to self-sustain 30GWh of storage, it needs to be able to smooth distribution and handle peaks. It'd be far more honest to look at seasonal average loads versus peaks, plus a buffer.

[1] https://energycentral.com/c/ec/world-battery-production

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1103401/predicted-lithiu...

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Re:Wind and solar are cheaper than thought, admits UK govern... by VBprogrammer on Thursday August 27, 2020 @05:24PM (#24298862)
The UK has very little hydroelectric power and the undeveloped hydro resources are in remote areas of outstanding natural beauty (which is a shame because it's by far the best option for base load renewables).

The UKs current installed pumped hydro resources amount to some 28GWh. Clearly we need a multiple of that if that is currently required to balance a grid consisting of largely dispatchable power. Given that, I don't think my estimate of needing several hours worth storage is too far out.

That was the first statistic I found. Even if we say current production is 200GWh of lithium battery storage, that isn't going to go very far if the rest of the world also need to create similar storage infrastructure.

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