Lithium ion battery production is at only ~400 GWh per year. By comparison, the US uses 12,500 TWh of electricity daily, or just over 500 GWh per hour. And this is only electricity, not total energy usage. Attempting to provision widespread lithium ion storage would lead to demand shock and skyrocketing prices. Not to mention it would involve delaying transition from ICE vehicles to EVs.
You're right in some scenarios: if a country has extensive dam networks, then yes renewables + storage could be cheaper. Dams provide immense energy storage capacity. Close the turbines when solar and wind are producing, open them when they're not. If a country is blessed with extensive hydroelectric potential then great.
But hydroelectricity is a matter of geography, and plenty of regions do not have the right geography to construct dams. Lithium ion battery storage is not cheaper than nuclear, and is not produced at sufficient scale to be viable for grid storage. Other proposals like hydrogen storage, flywheels, etc. have not actually been deployed to the grid so we have no real-world cost history for these systems. Somebody writing a white paper claiming $X/KWh of storage and actually building a system are two very different things.
I was suspicious of your numbers so I did a bunch of math and then realized you're using the European comma rather than a decimal. So 12,500 means 12.5, not 12500.
(EIA.gov says the U.S. used about 3.8 trillion kilowatt hours in 2020 [1]. 3.8 trillion kilowatt hours equals 3.8 billion megawatt hours, equals 3.8 million gigawatt hours, equals 3.8 thousand terawatt hours per year or 10.4 twh per day. If we figure the U.S. has about a hundred million households and divide 3,800 twh by that, we get 38 megawatt hours per household per year. This is a very rough estimate, as it doesn't include industrial/commercial/government users. If we divide by 365*24 to cancel out the time units, we get an average consumption of .004338 MW or 4.338 kilowatts per household. That sounds about right.)
Current battery production is only just barely getting started. China dominates production of LFP cells (which are ideal for grid storage) because of patents which are expiring, so hopefully we'll see more production outside of china in the near future.
LFP cells aren't bottlenecked by nickel or cobalt, and so the main resource constraints I believe are lithium, aluminum, and copper which are all quite a bit cheaper and available in bigger quantities. I think prices are expected to eventually settle somewhere around $80 per kwh of capacity for the cells, and I don't think we're that far off that now. (LFP may eventually be displaced by something else, like lithium sulfur or solid state batteries or something, but I think LFP is probably good enough.)
Maybe lithium or copper will become bottlenecks and prices will rise. Let's say prices do hold at about $80 per kwh. Maybe we'll round up to $120 per kwh to account for pack construction, a building to store the batteries, inverters, chargers, and so on. If the average U.S. adult-aged person uses about 2kw on average, then they need 48kwh of storage for 24 hours. That would be about $5760. If we amortize that over ten years, it's about $48 a month. That's kind of expensive, but it's within the realm of what can be done without assuming any major technological breakthroughs. We probably don't need 24 hours of storage, though, if we have enough renewable energy over-production and backup fossil fuel plants to use in extreme situations.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-elect...
If we imagine a near-future scenario - a battery powered house heated with heat pumps, driving an electric car, during central European foggy winter, which tends to last for about a week at a time. Let's say they use 60kWh/day. We're looking at $100k just for the batteries and installation, even assuming electricity comes free. In ~15-20 years, the batteries reach their recommended cycle life, requiring a choice of another $100k or accepting that what used to be a 3-day storage becomes 2-day
This is not some "extreme situation". It's a completely predictable scenario that recurs with near 100% probability every single year. Then there are places like Ganges river, Bangladesh or Indonesia, home to hundreds of millions of people, where neither solar, nor wind is viable (and land is scarce)
I think it's useful to think in terms of cars. I'm actually doing an EV conversion right now, and I have a motor controller that puts out about 100 kilowatts of 3-phase AC. It came with the motor so I don't have an exact price, but fair market value is probably around $1500. (That's retail cost in quantities of one. Wholesale cost is presumably somewhat less.) It weighs maybe ten pounds or so. That's adequate to power probably about a dozen houses. I don't know if it puts out a sine wave or a square wave. Even if it's the latter, you could imagine a hundred of these things putting out square waves with, say, randomly-varying pulse width and having it average out to a sine wave. There's probably better ways to do that, but anyways the point is that we do have the capacity to switch enormous amounts of power in a very small package for pretty low cost. It's actually kind of amazing.
Maybe if the batteries feed into an HVDC line or they're co-located with a solar plant, then you don't even need to deploy more inverters.
A battery management system for my conversion is a little over a thousand dollars for a setup with about 48 cells. In a big installation you could amortize BMS costs by using bigger cells, or placing them in parallel groups -- the downside being that it might take longer to notice if a cell is going bad. My BMS is made by a company that caters to EV conversions; they're doing low-volume sales. A major utility ordering the equivalent for hundreds of thousands of cells probably can get a nice volume discount.
As far as foggy winters go: renewable energy needs to be traded over a wide geographical area. Purely local generation doesn't really make sense, unless you have some useful purpose for unpredictable amounts of surplus energy. Wind power would need to be a part of it. Even fossil fuels are a reasonable option as long as they're not used very often. Running natural gas plants for a week or two in the dead of winter or in case of grid disruptions seems like a reasonable use of fossil fuels. Indonesia has a lot of land outside of Java. Even Java is pretty sparsely populated outside of cities. Most of it is jungle which we'd like them to keep and farms, but solar doesn't need to take up a huge percentage of available land. Even solar panels on roofs can go a long way.
I personally feel that in 10 years in India it will be cheaper to rent an electric car running on LFP for trips < 300 km along with a driver (cheaper here) than buy your own car.
It may not be so now, but in 7 years, or in other words, by the time a nuclear power plant commissioned today starts producing power, it definitely will.
Global li-ion manufacturing capacity is poised to triple by 2024:
https://www.luxresearchinc.com/blog/li-ion-manufacturing-in-...
Without a sudden, disruptive change in the cost and rate of deployment of nuclear there doesn't exist a path for it become a significantly larger part of the energy mix.
It's also ignoring that electricity usage is predicted to increase substantially worldwide as countries develop, and that these predictions of lithium ion battery production might not pan out. It'd also severely delay adoption of electric vehicles, as battery capacity is being diverted to grid storage away from EVs.
1. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-stora...
Still nuclear can be useful if some country are able to build them fast enough and cheap enough.
Your Storage does only need to be for 1-2 days (or more precisely until your renewables come online again to recharge them).
I don't see a massive shift to battery manufacturing any more crazy than building a crazy amount of nuclear power plants.
Even the much vaunted France doesn't have 80% nuclear on their grid.
Plus, energy storage production capacity is growing at an exponential rate. It's doubtful that we could grow our nuclear construction crews at that pace.
It's going to be very hard to nuclear to scale as fast as renewables and storage are, if there's even an economic case to be made for nuclear construction, and somebody finally solves the logistic problems of large construction projects in the modern Western world.
We know we can build storage and renewables, but we don't know how to build nuclear anymore, and none, absolutely none, of the nuclear proponents have any proposals to fix it. The best is an entirely new type of small reactor that has been rejects in the past because of its high per unit cost. Perhaps it will work, but who knows? It's a big risk, whereas storage and renewables are a sure bet.
It really isn't. For reference, across Europe we're currently having a meteorological phenomenon with bad weather, clouds, little wind, and low temperatures. It has been ongoing since ~october and is projected to continue into the winter. When Texas was hit with terrible weather last year, it lasted a few days. Multi-day storms, which take out solar and wind, aren't unheard of. 3 hours of storage is OK to even out things, but isn't nowhere near close enough to guarantee reliable electricity.
Personally I think small mass manufacturable fission reactors are the best bet but why are we hung up on either/or? We should aggressively pursue both nuclear and solar/wind generation.
Millions of lives are at stake.
I agree that we should invest in both. But it is not as easy as waving a magic wand. Energy project development is a complicated dance between local power market regulators, local and federal incentives, private investors, and shovel ready/cost-effective technology. And in the rare occasions when congress opens up the wallet, it is a small pie that everyone is fighting over, so the lobbyists start slinging arrows.
The fact is, nuclear can and will be a really great addition to the energy mix. But there are models out there that show that we can build a carbon free grid without it. The big question mark is on the future cost of storage. The consensus is that those costs are going to come down considerably. If so, then going all in on renewables likely gets us to a carbon free grid faster. But this is also a very US centric take. For example China likely has much easier road to rolling out nuclear (less regulatory hurdles, less local interference/input). Where as in the US, I am sure we can build a big national pro-nuclear movement, but the second someone proposes a real life project, the NIMBY's will come out of the woodwork.
This is not the current hurdle when it comes to more nuclear in the US or Europe. Nuclear is very welcome where it is currently under construction, and there's no regulatory reason that these sites have all become construction disasters, it's just bad execution of the reactors.
Even China's attempts to build the French EPR design took twice as long to build as they had estimated initially, and we don't really know how much more in cost.
Nuclear's path to new reactors begins with being able to build on a reliable schedule without exorbitant cost. There are many sites that would welcome more nuclear that would not have NIMBY problems, there's just no one willing to bear all the risk of finding that unicorn contractor that can actually build.
This same problem was also evident during the late 1970s and early 1980s nuclear projects. There was NIMBYism back then affecting projects, but there was also lots of construction malpractice that resulted in big cost overruns. US utilities can not bear the construction risk of a $10B project. Few entities can.
But we need all of that to electrify transportation, so where do you get the ones for the power grid?
Also, what happens to the price of batteries if you get rid of baseload and cause demand for batteries to spike much higher than even the increased amount of battery production capacity?
Maybe, maybe not. We know nuclear works so why not also make nuclear in case something happens and we can't build enough storage.
Adjusted for capacity factor this is maybe going to keep up with solar deployment, but definitely not with wind capacity growth in the same country. And China has been the world leader in nuclear deployment for a while now.
Renewables win on a "worse is better" basis - yes, they're intermittent, but they're cheap and deploy in a matter of months without too many specialists involved.
You're simplifying out that electric consumption varies during the day.
Browsing the last day's energy usage yields peaks at:
Eastern: 8pm
Central: 7pm
Mountain 6pm
Pacific: 5pm
Look at the chart in your last link:
https://www.nrdc.org/experts/kevin-steinberger/debunking-thr...
They match up demand with load by using a buttload of hydro and and even larger amount of natural gas. We can't use natural gas if we're trying to get rid of fossil fuels and we can't use hydro in places without appropriate geography, so then what?
To say nothing of what happens when solar and wind are "it's cloudy and there's no wind right now" intermittent rather than time-of-day intermittent.
https://www.factcheck.org/2019/11/what-does-science-say-abou...
> To start, we’ll consider Sanders’ claim that “scientists tell us” that it’s possible to get to a zero-carbon electrical grid without nuclear power.
> “The shortest answer is yes, that’s true. Scientists do tell us that we can,” said Drew Shindell, a climate scientist at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment.
> Ryan Jones, an expert in electricity systems and a co-founder of Evolved Energy Research, a consulting company that models low-carbon transitions, agreed. “Anyone who says that nuclear is 100% necessary on a technical basis, I would claim, just hasn’t looked at the alternatives in enough detail,” he said in an email.
> Most experts FactCheck.org contacted, including those who think nuclear power should remain an option, said that from a technical perspective, nuclear is not needed to decarbonize the grid.
> Most experts agree that Sanders is correct that it’s technologically possible to decarbonize the grid without using nuclear power. But many researchers also say keeping nuclear on the table makes decarbonization easier and more likely.
> But technically possible is not the same as practically feasible, or the most cost-effective. In that regard, many, although not all, researchers say nuclear — or something like it — is likely to be necessary to some degree. And even if nuclear is ultimately not needed, they say, the safer strategy is not to exclude it.
But what does "technically" mean?
> “All the evidence says it is possible to decarbonize the energy system in the U.S. without using nuclear power,” said Jones. But, he added, there are cases, such as places that don’t have good wind resources, in which building new nuclear plants can reduce the cost of decarbonizing. Depending on the region, he said, “getting to 100% renewable energy is either very expensive or necessitates significant new transmission to import resources from elsewhere.”
> That’s where nuclear can be helpful. It doesn’t have to be nuclear — Jones said carbon capture and sequestration, or CCS, for example, would also work. Sanders’ plan, notably, specifically excludes CCS.
> A large number of scenarios expanded nuclear power, Shindell said, to around double today’s level. He estimated that 90% of the scenarios included nuclear capacity above today’s level, and just one or two scenarios phased out nuclear entirely by 2100.
And the article, that YOU LINKED, goes on like this. I feel like you are being very disingenuous. I don't think anyone (or at least anyone that is informed, but then again that's probably too much to expect here given comments), is saying that nuclear is _absolutely_ necessary. I do think people are saying that it is much easier and cheaper if it is included within the solution. I do think people mischaracterize the arguments though and frame it as "all nuclear" vs "all renewables" but the truth is that both those solutions are absurd. We want a mixture and what that mixture is is going to depend on the region and country that is producing power. It is rather complicated and nuanced and the conversations typically don't acknowledge this.
Maybe part of the problem here is scientific lingo. We say "technically" and "possible" a lot of times, even if our confidence intervals are pretty small. This is something we can work on, but it is often to avoid infighting because someone else will argue "but 'technically' it is possible, just really unlikely/difficult" and you'll have to concede. You'll see this in any "nerd debate".
Either way, I'm going to call you out for misrepresenting your source.
[0] https://www.factcheck.org/2019/11/what-does-science-say-abou...
I’m not splitting hairs, I’m arguing very clearly that nuclear won’t get built, it won’t be needed, alternatives will meet demand, and that energy consumption and generation modeling by a variety of energy analysts (across commercial and academic institutions) supports my thesis.
FTFY
But yes, I think you are more accurately capturing my response. And thanks for the defense.
That's his thing. He makes broad to the point of indefensible claims, backs them up with a laundry list of tangentially related links, almost always from the news (and we all know how much the news loves to report "the whole truth"), and then when he gets called out he moves goalposts around muddies the waters and does all sorts of tricks that are SOP when arguing in bad faith. If he were not constantly arguing for viewpoints that more or less correlate with the net average HN user his posts would have been defaulted to dead long ago. I think he believes his own BS so it's debatable whether he is technically arguing in bad faith but it sure fails the duck test.
The only way to win is to not engage.
To be frank, it sounds more like you are disgruntled and are unhappy when the facts presented (as well as the general consensus of the forum, as you mention in the comment I'm replying to) don't align with your belief system. I don't mean to be rude by any means, but I'm unable to come to any other conclusion based on my (imho, polite) interactions with you. I do believe my conclusions based on the data I present. Why would I comment and participate if I didn't? I don't take issue if you choose to not engage, but I'd appreciate if you'd tone down the libel and attacks on my character in a public forum if you choose to not bring facts and argue ideas.
If they can beat France on cost then here is a political win to be made. Be it using lithium batteries to store up 3-4 weeks worth of the nations energy consumption, or the more likely green hydrogen which is commonly suggested as being more likely choice for wind energy.
The current commercial viable lithium battery solution, that which solar farms has written articles about, is around 4 hours of 80% capacity. Not bad. Every day the batteries get charged when the sun is at its peak and powers prices is at its lowest point, and every day when the sun goes down they can utilize the highest price point as demand exceed supply of cheap energy.
For wind it is a bit more complicated. You can have a few weeks of good weather, followed by a long period of low wind conditions and high demand. A few hours won't cut it, and the more capacity you add the slower the discharge cycle will be. Green hydrogen would be a more economical storage medium, but right now the technology is having a hard time to be economical viable. That said it would benefit the world if Germany made a run for it so we can compare the cost to nuclear.
Unlike pledges, which can be produced instantly, actually bringing reliable power online takes more than 3 years.
It's these types of pledges that make the public view these replacement efforts as fundamentally unserious.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of nuclear and think the industrialized west should follow in France's footsteps. But we will not get there by 2025. We may never get there as long as we approach this problem in such an unserious manner.
I agree with you however that it will take much longer than 3 years. Lithium batteries can be done today for the kind of storage solution which they are suitable, but not for wind. The green hydrogen might work, but we have yet to see large scale production and we are nowhere near to have it operate as an alternative to natural gas on a nation scale. Germany should really make an attempt if they wish to take a different path from France, but it will likely take a few decades if its successful.
Solar and wind often overproduce (leading to negative prices). This (otherwise useless energy) will be used to produce dihydrogen (water electrolysis), which will be stored, then used to produce electricity (fuel cell).
Canadian politicians are pledging to develop blue hydrogen in Alberta. That means transforming hydrocarbons into hydrogen.
Yep, it is as stupid as it sounds. Consume fossil fuels to produce hydrogen and label it blue energy.
- able to store otherwise is wasted energy
- affordable (the total price of this storing-then-reconversion into electricity is OK) is adequate
- storing in adequate volumes
is adequate, even if its total efficiency is below .01
Blue hydrogen isn't good (emission-wise), but may be used as a way to evaluate and enhance what will ultimately be a green (electric energy only produced by renewable used to obtain dihydrogen) system.
Moreover there are quick and decisive progress towards better efficiency.
Salt cavern storage doesn’t change the math.
As for efficiency: https://www.vicat.com/news/vicat-schlumberger-new-energy-cea...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187661021...
> Salt cavern storage doesn’t change the math
"Total on- and offshore European hydrogen storage potential estimated at 84.8 PWhH2." is pretty significant and pertinent.
It's as simple as that. They are an exporter.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2019/07/01/new-sola...
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/06/28/los-angeles-seeks-rec...
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.365.6449.108
https://e360.yale.edu/features/in-boost-for-renewables-grid-...
https://www.nrdc.org/experts/kevin-steinberger/debunking-thr...