> We only need about 3 hours worth of storage

This doesn't align with the analysis that I've seen. For example in this post (https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/the-disastrous-economics...) the analysis shows that California would have to spend about $5 trillion on battery storage to have a solar+wind+battery grid.

If the book you reference was accurate we would be seeing headlines about power companies bragging about these new grid arrangements but instead I just see headlines about how India an China are moving ahead with enormous amounts of coal power plants, rapidly increasing energy costs where intermittent power generation is a significant fraction of power capacity (i.e. Germany), and power outages when base load generating capacity isn't sufficient to keep the lights on when the sun sets and the wind dies.

> Due to seasonality of the availability of the wind and sun, most locations require a month or more of battery capacityto get a fully-wind/solar system through a year.

Yeah if their assumptions include a month or more then you can end up with an astronomically big sum. Also you don't need batteries for all your energy storage and they use todays battery prices to come up with that number.

Is there even enough lithium on earth for global grid storage, nevermind electric vehicles?

Yes. Worst case, lithium can be extracted from seawater: https://electrek.co/2021/06/04/scientists-have-cost-effectiv... - but it's currently cheaper to get it from somewhere else. And lithium can be recycled. In the near future, I think most cars will use LFP batteries.

There is a good chance that batteries for grid storage will be from different technologies than lithium.

For instance:

https://ambri.com/

stationary batteries do not need to be from lithium. please search for iron or rust batteries.

That article summary says:

> Yet even in systems which meet >90% of demand, hundreds of hours of unmet demand may occur annually.

and

> satisfy countries’ electricity demand in 72–91% of hours (83–94% by adding 12 h of storage).

So not 3 hours and still significant number of days without power.

You back that up with combustion turbines burning some renewably-sourced fuel.

Capital cost of a simple cycle combustion turbine power plant: $500/kW Capital cost of a nuclear power plant: $10,000/kW

So, one can have this backup sitting there ready to go for just 5% of the cost of an all nuclear grid. You do need the fuel, but if it's only used a few hundred hours per year the fuel cost will be minor.

That's without overbuild. Look at the graphs at the back, the ones with 3x overbuild and 3 hours of storage. Small countries still have unmet demand, but Russia, US and Canada do not.

Oh, please. Up north, like here in Finland, you’d be hard pressed to get by with 3 months of storage.