Walks through the numbers on what it would take to run California on renewables + storage alone.
Because of the intermittency, it seems like the costs of storage (even though it gets better/cheaper each year) maker it not possible.
I watched the video and I'm not sure I even caught what the problem was supposed to be? There was a vague implication that solar and batteries were expensive, but I didn't see any actual comparison to how much gas and nuclear would cost as an alternative.
Solar PV is the cheapest available energy, and California will probably generate about 3/4 of its energy with it. Currently about 50% of their electricity is gas, so whenever the sun is shining they can stop burning gas and save money and carbon.
Solar PV plus lithium batteries are already cheaper than peaking gas and so being rolled out for purely financial reasons and the price gap is only widening.
So when do the problems start?
It is legitimate to ask whether there will ever be enough lithium battery production capacity to to provide for both cars and utilities, but it is a made-up problem because almost all utility storage will not be lithium batteries, but something cheaper.
California already has quite a lot of pumped hydro capacity in place, and could add more cheaply by adding pumps to existing reservoir penstocks.
I feel like we're back at the point in the cycle were the detractors say "solar is a net negative" or "wind can never supply more than 17%". It's not based on science or economics just pessimism.
Fundamentally, solar and lithium batteries are cheap, abundant alternative that cost less than the next best thing. They're going to be a lot bigger than most people currently expect, especially in sunny regions like California with good regulations in the short term, and long term they will utterly dominate in Equatorial regions on market price alone.
Daily cycle storage has been a known solved issue for a while, we're just waiting for the pricing and deployment to catch up. And seasonal storage now looks likely to be green hydrogen, again solved before we really need it.
Just the queue of planned projects today in California, Chile and China is enough to show this is true.
Growth pains of a rapidly growing battery manufacturing sector should provide the opposite impression that people seem to take. Always with the "at current rates" stats to make change seem impossible.
Yes, new things that don't exist don't exist, that's why we invented them and built big factories to make them, because we wanted them to exist in large numbers.
Real utilities will rely on whatever storage is cheapest at the time they need to build it. Batteries will remain among the most expensive storage, but are good for load-smoothing.
Synthetic fuels cost more, but have desirable externalities: utilities can sell excess production. Those costs are falling fast, too.
Private companies will absorb some part of the societal cost of intermittent electricity, by letting factories and workplaces stay idle when power costs are high - this will filter down to lower wages for the employees of those companies.
Smaller real costs. It costs less to build and operate a solar or wind farm than just to operate an already-paid-for coal plant. It costs, just now, about the same to build and operate a solar or wind farm as to just operate an already-paid-for nuke. But renewable costs are still falling fast.
Cost of storage is falling faster than wind or solar ever did. By the time Cali needs to build storage -- after there is renewable generation capacity to charge it from -- it will be very cheap.
And storage has some very hard physical limits on scaling up that will prevent costs from falling a lot - mostly the actual amount of the elements on earth that are needed for the batteries.
If you have to lie to make your case, what does that tell your readers?
The "engineering calculations" are so extremely simplified that I would call them wrong. You need a lot of water for nuclear plants btw. to conduct away the heat.
And especially in that dry regions with insane amounts of space solar energy would outcompete nuclear on every possible metric and it isn't close.
This is the problem: with current technology, if you include storage, solar / wind has both the worst prices and externalities.
Replacing storage with load-following (hydro, Geothermal, modern nuclear) is necessary unless we find ways of storage that beat current theoretical limitations
Absolutely false. Most storage used today (95%+) is pumped hydro, which is very cheap. Costs for all kinds of storage are falling even faster than solar or wind ever did.
There are no theoretical limitations on storage. Most storage is just E = Fx, understood and applied for centuries.
If you have to lie to make your case, what does that tell readers about your case?
Hydro is ideal, but the problem is it needs mountains and huge amounts of water, which aren't accessible everywhere
You also didn't address the main point: storage drives up costs and externalities which most people advocating for intermittent sources seem to completely sweep under the rug
It is just the most expensive power, discounting externalities like CO2, disaster liability, decommissioning, and waste management. Include the latter, and it gets worse. Include CO2, and coal is worse.
The cheapest power, with or without externalities, is solar followed by wind. A dollar spent on those produces several times as many kWh as anything else.
They are of course intermittent, but that doesn't matter much because their share of total generation is low. As their contribution comes to dominate, we will need to add storage. Until then, money is overwhelmingly more usefully spent adding generating capacity, as is being done. But a hell of a lot more should have been and needs to be spent on that.