Global battery production remains in the low hundreds of gigawatt hours annually. And only a small fraction of that is going to grid storage, in the single-digit gigawatt hours. Global electricity consumption is 60 TWh per day and continuing to rise. Alternatives like compressed air, hydrogen, thermal batteries, etc. still remain in the prototyping phase. Whether or not they prove to be viable is totally unknown.

We are going to be in this markedly temporary situation until we experience a miraculous breakthrough in energy storage that yields several orders-of-magnitude improvement. Breakthrough technology that's 10-20 years away often stays 10-20 years away for a lot longer than that.

Since we will not need to rely on batteries for utility energy storage, battery production capacity is no impediment to renewable grid storage buildout.

There are plenty of known viable storage methods, which you oddly omit all of except compressed air. There are no impediments to their implementation beyond simply scaling up; no new materials science, no new physics or chemistry, or industrial process barriers need to be solved. It is just not clear which will end up cheapest in each use environment.

Other, less mature technologies, e.g. electrically synthesizing ammonia and hydrogen efficiently, need to be developed anyway, and once developed, will also be incidentally useful for storage. Their independent industrial demand will drive fast improvement, so they may come to displace the others.

There absolutely are impediments to implementation. Producing hydrogen efficiently through electrolysis demands very effective electrodes which we are still trying to develop, for example. We only know that these solutions ar hypothetically possible, not that they are viable. Let alone viable at scale. Let alone cheaper than existing options.

Until one of those storage methods actually becomes viable at scale, rather than in laboratories, we'll be burning fossil fuels.

You pivot again to hydrogen, which is not among the cheap, currently-viable alternatives being scaled.

My point is that we've already been doing this: exploring various storage mechanisms and pivoting to ones that are more viable, to use your terminology. And so far two forms of storage have proven viable: pumped hydroelectricity and electrochemical storage (AKA batteries). Neither are available at the scale required. The market reveals what actually is viable. If these solutions you allude to are viable, then we should see people offering to build this storage at competitive prices

Will some technological breakthrough not only make these alternatives viable, but superior to existing storage by multiple orders of magnitude? Maybe, but a massive leap like that is not something we can depend on happening.

Again: No technological breakthrough of any kind is needed to make viable the alternatives I cited. (This must be why you repeatedly try to divert attention from those alternatives.) All that is needed is scaling up already thoroughly-understood engineering.

A GW-scale liquified air plant is now under construction in UK, after 100% successful pilot projects. Numerous underground compressed-air projects are running, successfully. Neither depends on even a single breakthrough.

Pumped hydro works, but only in certain places. Batteries work, but are expensive and compete with other uses. Alternatives cheaper than batteries are being fielded today. Until they are ready for full-scale use, NG generation is temporarily adequate. Its temporary use in no way invalidates wind-and-solar, backed by storage of a form to be determined, as a primary long-term energy source.

Multiple orders of magnitude is absolutely the norm for scale-up of mature technology, newly useful, like the examples cited. Pretending otherwise is disingenuous. Who do you imagine you are fooling?

> Again: No technological breakthrough of any kind is needed to make viable the alternatives I cited. (This must be why you repeatedly try to divert attention from those alternatives.) All that is needed is scaling up already thoroughly-understood engineering.

What do you mean? I addressed the shortcomings of the alternatives you cited: Hydrogen has difficulties with large scale electrolysis. Ammonia is just the storage mechanisms for hydrogen, so it suffers from the same problem. You referenced hydrogen and ammonia here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27696690), so accusing me of diverting attention is rather strange. Compressed air can only achieve good efficiency if the compressed air is not allowed to cool down, which needs good insulation. Can you provide a source for the GW-scale compressed air project? Because all of the ones I can find are in the hundreds of megawatt hours [1]. Again, we need tens of TWh.

I think you're making the grave mistake of assuming semiconductor scaling applies to large infrastructure projects. This is very rarely the case for machinery and big physical engineering projects. Are we able to build dams for 1/1,000th the price as in the 1930s? Are we able to build jet turbines for 1/1,000th the cost? Or cars? We've had plenty of time to optimize and achieve the vast gains we supposedly achieve. Cars did see a sharp decline in cost, but it took a breakthrough to achieve that: assembly line manufacturing. And even then it was more like a factor of 20x improvement, not 1,000x.

Ultimately, we fundamentally disagree on whether is safe to assume that technologies in either the prototyping or demonstrator phase will become 1,000 times cheaper than the present options. I think it's unsafe to assume they will become viable at all let alone orders of magnitude better than the present options. Clearly you think otherwise, and believe in it with such conviction you accuse those who say otherwise of acting in bad faith. I don't think there's anything more productive to say here other that time will tell.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed-air_energy_storag...

You can be as dishonest as you like, and I will call you on it each time.

I specifically cited ammonia and hydrogen as examples that may someday take over the storage load from the immediately viable alternatives I listed. (BTW, Ammonia is, in fact, not "just the storage mechanism for hydrogen", but is rather the heir apparent to bunker fuel for shipping. An industrial-scale electric ammonia plant is under construction in Norway. We will need just 1000 more of them to fuel all shipping.)

Underground compressed air does, in fact, get excellent insulation from the earth packed around it. Underwater compressed air does not, in fact, need insulation, because it may absorb heat from the water on its way out.

There is no need for air compression to become 1000x cheaper than at present. Air compression is mature technology. It only needs 1000x bigger capacity, achieved simply by scaling up well-understood technology. There is no need for air liquification to become 1000x cheaper. It is already mature, and efficient. It just needs to be scaled up, as we see occurring.

It might not be dishonesty or disingenuousness, it might be simple gullibility. The same person posted a link designed to fool gullible people and then proceeded to demonstrate that he had indeed been fooled by it:

https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...

He claimed, with this link as backing, that all nuclear waste would fit in a small space, when in fact the link overlooks the vast majority of nuclear waste and considers only a minuscule though important subset, the spent fuel. We don’t even know if the source article is playing more tricks with words, but the mistake with gullibility here is already bad enough.

To give some credit where (malicious) credit is due, I do believe that the creators of the web page may have been striving for the goal of fooling such gullible people in exactly this way on exactly this matter. While technically honest, the site is dishonest and disingenuous in spirit, because it’s promoting such a misunderstanding, with a clear agenda and a not-so-innocent reason for doing so.