With battery factories. The very same that will be required to electrify vehicles when jurisdictions are enacting combustion vehicle sales bans at the end of the decade. 74-78 million new vehicles are sold each year. That's a lot of battery demand, which will be a forcing function to scale up battery manufacturing, driving down costs.

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-energy/electri...

> How are we going to dispose of them?

We recycle them. We already do today. https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/ (Redwood has battery recycling agreements with several automakers)

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/07/electric-vehicles-wor...

The world could face lithium shortages by 2025, the International Energy Agency (IEA) says, while Credit Suisse thinks demand could treble between 2020 and 2025, meaning “supply would be stretched”.

About 2 billion EVs need to be on the road by 2050 for the world to hit net zero, the IEA says, but sales stood at just 6.6 million last year, and some carmakers are already selling out of EVs.

Lithium supply faces challenges not only from surging demand, but because resources are concentrated in a few places and over half of today’s production is in areas with high water stress.

Sure, and rare earth metals aren't really all that rare. The problem is that the processing cost is well beyond economical for most of it.

Abundance alone is irrelevant; you need certain concentrations for the mining process to be viable. AFAIK that is the challenge with Li: the necessary concentrations are only found in several places of the world.

In the future, we might be able to mine lithium from some sources that are now useless, but the environmental cost might be enormous.

In an ideal world we would innovate with better chemistries which would render the need for lithium obsolete before we cause more damage. I know the technology exists (particularly for grid scale storage), but knowing humans, we will probably ruin more environments (and foreign economies) before such technologies will be meaningfully explored.

Anyway, consider: https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.4994054

This paper explains how one can storage power at an efficiency of 65-75% using machinery made with ordinary materials operated at modest temperatures.

A number of alternative chemistries exist, which are much less expensive and less flammable. They of course have lower energy density, but it does not play a major role: batteries sitting on the ground can afford to be be bulky and heavy.

A good summary is at https://www.ceem.unsw.edu.au/sites/default/files/uploads/pub...

and https://www.nrdc.org/experts/kevin-steinberger/debunking-thr...

The truth is that a "base load plant" is one that can only supply the base load, as it has to be kept running most of the time to have a possible chance of making economic sense. Being a base load plant is a negative thing, indicating inflexibility.

Not if they are generating base load. This is why base load is an important concept.

As an example: the combination of wind/solar/storage that could be used to provide the equivalent of a nuclear power plant's output could ALSO be used to provide some flexibility, by altering when the storage is charged and discharged. This flexibility would allow it to generate more value for the same number of kWh provided to the grid.

The variability of wind and solar is actually a HUGE problem. It makes managing the grid much harder and required a large amount of idle generating capacity as backup. This is why proponents love to argue against the very fundamental concept of base load.

Variability is in fact a trivial problem solved by storage and transportable backup. Even NG suffices as backup. Even coal suffices as backup. In the future, ammonia will take up that role.

We have the tech (you're almost certainly already using it), we have not deployed it at sufficient scale yet.

But we are building the factories to make the batteries, and the mines to feed the factories, as fast as we can raise money to do so.

I'm not sure what's happening with hydrogen (apparently it's much cheaper than batteries?); but regardless, that technology predates all forms of generating electricity more complex than the etymological origin of the word (ἤλεκτρον, amber) — "rubbing things together" was the only option when Deimand and van Troostwijk charged their Leyden jar back in 1789 and demonstrated electrolysis.

It's fine to say "the factories need to be built", as long as they can be built at a manageable price. But price is a huge factor that cannot be ignored, and it's high enough in this situation to make the word "trivial" incorrect.

No new problems need to be solved, so in that sense it is trivial.

It costs a lot of money in absolute terms, so in that sense it is not trivial.

The cost (for global battery based storage, the most expensive serious storage option) is in the order of 6 months global supply of crude oil to turn rocks into batteries (i.e. the dumbest possible limit on the cost of recycling), those batteries last at least three years even using the worst cycle-count estimates I've seen and throwing the batteries away at 70% of initial peak capacity, that's trivial.

Opening new mines and factories, even if the new mines provide new work for workers currently in fossil fuels, may be a significant geopolitical and economic shift, so in that sense it isn't trivial.

And so on.

For hydrogen, it's "build a tank that only leaks a little bit". (We'd probably be better off adding some carbon to that hydrogen, but I have no idea if anyone is working on that at sufficient scale even though the tech is over a century old).

Factories for any form of storage are not different in any material way from a thousand other factories we know work. We have been making factories for going on three centuries, and know we can. Making and operating factories is expensive capex, but exploring, extracting, transporting, and refining fossil fuels is an even more expensive opex. If we could afford fossil opex, renewable capex of similar order is strictly better.

If an inflexible source is cheaper, then it may better a fit as a high capacity factor supplier to meet constant demand.

We first need to agree on the problems and the solution, using levelised costs for lifetime of plant, and safe disposal, preferably using real examples, but theoretical best case examples are also worth discussing.

I'm inclined to believe there is no best pasta sauce, only best pasta sauces. One size does not, in face, fit all.

You must be misreading the comment or something.

They didn't say it's the only factor, they said it's a negative. It's a negative no matter how the costs align.

In what world is it reasonable to implement unrequired, unnecessary, and costly, features and call that a net positive in all cases under all circumstances.

Also, some sources are more flexible by their very nature and get the flexibility for free.

But more generally, lacking flexibility is a negative by itself. It's an acceptable negative if adding flexibility would cost more than the benefit, but it's still a negative.

Not for baseload generation.

And most people would call "can't be used for the more difficult parts of power generation" a negative too.

Lol, is that supposed to impress? Tens of trillions, and you're talking money.

Global spend on oil and gas is in the neighborhood of $4T per year. Coal is another $1T. Per year.

$0.1T or $0.8T spent on making batteries, that last ten or twenty years apiece, is small change in comparison.

The argument is about who gets the money.

A 4 hour battery for the entirety of world primary energy is about the same cost as one year of auto industry revenue. SIBs require no scarce resources and no toxic elements -- they're basically fancy dirt.

For longer scale storage, there are electrolyser industries spooling up in multiple countries. Some of the individual factories are big enough to produce the entire presently installed base in 5 years. Existing OCGT plants have minimal capital and fixed costs, and can burn hydrogen or ammonia basically at cost -- yielding indefinite storage for what is effectively a fixed 4x multiple of the cost of energy.