Annual battery production for EVs is estimated to grow from 160 gigawatt-hours (GWh) today to 6 600 GWh in 2030 – the equivalent of adding almost 20 gigafactories each year for the next ten years.

So we're building those batteries anyway, because EVs are cheaper and better than ICE. It's just a bonus that they'll help roll out renewables too.

Estimates are not the same thing as real production figures. People estimated we'd have 10Ghz single threaded cpu performance by now back in the 90s. Batteries are already approaching supply shortages for input materials: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/shortages-flagged-ev...

And as you correctly point out, most of these batteries are going to go to EVs rather than grid storage.

Yes, no-one can predict the future, maybe we'll all be riding horses.

But if, as basically everyone acklowledges, we'll all be driving EVs, then we will charge them from the grid. So they'll be better than grid storage, they'll be responsive demand (with grid storage you need to send the electricity back to the grid, which incurs another efficiency loss).

Sure, if we have all our electricity produced through non intermittent sources we don't need grid storage. EVs charge from the grid and drive around just fine. Nobody doubts that.

But if we are going to predominantly use intermittent energy sources we'd need massive amounts of grid storage. Delivering this through batteries is not feasible. We need to conserve battery supply for things that cannot be directly powered from the grid, like vehicles. It's too precious to be squandered on grid storage

For me, this is the biggest part of the debate. It's not whether solar is up to the task or not, it's whether supply chains can support solar. From what we've seen, no, they cannot. You can provision the solar plant and the storage array, but there likely just won't be enough panels or batteries being produced to build it. Pumped hydro storage is only viable in some places, and from what it seems to me all the other ideas for energy storage are theoretical at best.

I'm not opposed to investing heavily in solar...it's the best long-term energy source we can hope for until we crack the fusion nut. However, until we have the resources in place to make it happen, fission is our best bet. This shouldn't be an either-or: we should be building both, as fast as we can. And once we have enough solar to power our collective needs consistently, we can decommission our nuclear plants and put this behind us.

The supply chain for solar is in a much healthier state than the supply chain for nuclear.

Yes, at the current scale. Can it scale up to the task of entirely replacing fossil fuels before we can build the nuclear plants that can give the same output?

Yes. Scaling up solar and wind is much easier. Nuclear reactors require very heavy industry (look at what's needed to forge the reactor pressure vessel of a PWR). Nuclear also requires much higher quality manufacturing. A 1% failure rate on PV modules is acceptable. A 1% failure rate on reactor components is not.

Installing wind and solar is also much easier than installing NPPs. Solar installation does not require expensive highly trained labor, again because the installations are robust to installation mistakes.

> Solar installation does not require expensive highly trained labor

That's why the number of solar power related deaths (Mainly, falling from roofs) far exceeds the single fatality from nuclear related incidents we had this century.

A solar powered world will mostly use large scale ground mounted solar, which is much cheaper than putting it awkwardly on roofs.

Grid storage cost is falling even faster than renewables cost. Which you already knew.

The costs are falling on white papers, not in actual storage projects. Unfortunately, we can't hook a white paper up to the grid :(

You may pretend all you like, but I will always correct you.

Correct me how?

By insisting that storage is a trivial problem to solve, yet neglecting to actually share what your supposed solution is?

By insisting that storage costs are falling yet neglecting to specify the cost and for what technology?

By all means "correct" me all you like.

Other readers only need to know that you habitually promote falsehoods.