https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200423005264/en/8mi...
China being the “main supplier” has more to do with them undercutting everyone else in refining by not paying attention enough to their environment, it isn’t sustainable. All of these raw materials have ample reserves outside of China. Some of battery economy comes from that, but not most of it.
There are other ways to store energy than batteries. The Pacific Northwest and even California has a lot of pumped storage hydro capacity. Hydro is a renewable that can be used on demand, and can be combined with other renewables to move water back up to reservoirs.
It's not just a case of them being happy to dig nasty stuff out of the ground without care. If anything it's because they lack a specific type of nasty stuff to dig out of the ground and so their government hasn't been totally captured by fossil fuel interests.
The west actively abdicated their early lead on all these technologies.
China still produces plenty of coal, so I'm not sure what your point is. I guess you mean oil, and their move into EVs totally makes sense from that context even if they can get it cheaply from Iran and Russia these days.
But the cost is huge. Even the Chinese central government is pragmatic enough to admit that they have a huge unsustainable problem; e.g. https://time.com/6258519/china-lithium-mining-environmental-...
> The crackdown in Yichun, Jiangxi province, follows a local lithium frenzy over the past year as miners raced to feed rampant demand for the battery material — and to benefit from record global prices. Now, they’re grappling with a close-up inspection by environment officials sent from Beijing.
You can tour the Chinese countryside and find tons of places like this.
> The west actively abdicated their early lead on all these technologies.
The west could not keep up Chinese refiners because Chinese refiners have little regard for their environment. As the Chinese central government cracks down and the west worries more about their resource security, the Chinese will simply lose that advantage.
At this point somebody usually argues that you can only do that in Australia and the geography for pumped storage is super rare (I call it the "theres a shortage of up" fallacy), and I have to cite the same study proving that it's actually not.
Which makes the geography question moot. But most people's intuitions on renewables/battery are years out of date so it's confusing to respond to their sarcastic "are we just going to build lots of batteries, LOL" with "actually yes that's going to be sensible for 80% of the world's population".
edit: long article comparing Snowy to more solar plus batteries:
https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/snowy-2-vs-battery-stora...
>Hornsdale Power Reserve: $690 per kilowatt-hour of storage capacity. If Snowy Hydro 2 comes in at $10 billion, its cost per kilowatt of power will be $5,000, which is 5.6 times more than Hornsdale. But its cost per kilowatt-hour of storage capacity is much lower no matter if you think $20, $29, or $250 is appropriate.
In other words in terms of storing a large volume of energy, cheaply, at high efficiency, pumped storage blows everything else out of the metaphorical water - between 3x and 34.5x cheaper!
I would say that batteries and large scale pumped storage complement each other. I don't agree that Australia will regret building it.
The main drawbacks [of battery storage] are: At the moment, it has a much higher cost per kilowatt-hour of storage capacity. Much shorter lifespan.
If we consider Snowy Hydro 2’s maximum possible energy storage capacity, it comes to only $20 to $29 per kilowatt-hour
$5,000 [buys] 5.16 kilowatt-hours of Hornsdale storage
The article continuously harps on about kW comparisons, and ignores comparing kWh storage: foolish for an article supposedly about electricity storage. For example the article makes the inane point: “If Snowy Hydro 2 comes in at $10 billion, its cost per kilowatt of power output comes to… $5,000 per kilowatt. That’s not cheap. Gas generation normally comes to under $1,000 per kilowatt.”, and again “Snowy 2 Vs. Hornsdale: Assuming Snowy Hydro 2 costs $5,000 per kilowatt of power output, for that cost, we could instead buy . . .”.
Utter rubbish.
So if enough solar gets built that the electricity price falls to near zero every day, batteries are now cheaper than natural gas?
That's a very impactful change that I honestly didn't see coming.
The other 2 months a year sure, you've got either grid power or an off grid oil/gas generator.
> And are there that numbers of batteries available
Not yet — but there are enough people investing in each stage of mining, processing, and making battery factories, that this is probably not going to be an issue.
> Currently dependent on availability of cobalt, lithium,manganese and nickel with China as the main supplier of these and world’s largest producer of graphite, the primary anode material for Li-ion batteries.
Technically, I think, yes; but that's just where we are today rather than a fundamental property of world geography.