Most storage is short term, so the same battery can be re-used again and again by charging and discharging it, e.g. 365 solar peaks a year in sunny countries. Longer term storage would lock up the battery for longer, which given the cost of batteries, wouldn't make financial sense.

It's not 25% more batteries. It's some 500% to 1000% more. But those would be used very few times.

So in other words batteries don't get us anywhere close to 80% of the way.

There's many ways to judge what "80%" is. The batteries will cycle many times every week. They will have much more energy flowing through them in a year than the storage we need for dunkelflaute would.

Yes, in terms of amount of energy stored at full capacity, batteries would not get us to 80%. But those last 20% have reduced requirements for charge/discharge rates, effiency, cost/kWh, which makes many other solutions viable.

Depends on how you're slicing it. By the total flux of energy batteries may be able to handle 80% of the "energy traffic" over the course of a day by smoothing out day/night cycles.

However that last 25% needs to be stored over long periods where the cost is prohibitive to store in current battery systems.

A system that can store 1000% more energy than what is possible with batteries could very well power the entire system. Thus eliminating the need for batteries for this purpose. It's always something that stuck out to me as an obvious point that few have noticed.

Batteries have high round trip efficiency ~80% or more, where many long term storage options are much much lower.

If your storing nearly free power for 9 months then having 40% round trip efficiency may not actually be a problem.

You can build twice as many solar panels. It is making batteries that is problematic. Not to mention the argument supposes that the storage system must only output electricity, which is not necessarily the case.

Batteries really aren’t problematic. EV’s need more batteries than the grid and there’s plenty of raw materials to cover global EV’s needs on top of this grid batteries have more options because they didn’t need portability or a 25 year lifespan etc.

If your alternative now needs massive amounts of solar panels just to charge it then suddenly it’s vastly more expensive. Also, both batteries and solar panels are bottlenecked by production capacity, so no you can’t just snap your fingers and have twice as many panels.

Also, deploying any other system at scale means ramping up production of that.

Those sound like excuses. FYI, a lot of the alternatives are things like pumped hydro which isn't that inefficient. Many situations just need heat at the end, and therefore don't need pure electricity.

I am merely pointing out that the battery part seems like an unnecessary component.

There are zero viable alternatives when you start talking TWh.

That’s simply the reality and why there isn’t any long term grid storage, nothing is even close to viable when compared to batteries and extra generation.

Pumped hydro simply doesn’t scale. You can look at topographic maps and do some basic math but the vast quantities of water you would need simply don’t have enough locations to be viable. Worse, the fewer times you use that infrastructure the larger the payback you need when it’s actually in use.

Hydrogen is expensive, has terrible round trip efficiencies, dangerous to store, etc etc.

Now you're just lying. Pump hydro scales better than batteries, although there are geographic limitations. Compressed air and thermal also scale better than batteries while not having any geographic limitations. Hydrogen scales beyond every else in terms of quantity, and this becomes even more pronounced once you talk about hydrogen derivatives like ammonia.

And you're consistently ignoring the part about not everything needing electricity exclusively. Any sort of heat utilization or recapture massively increases efficiency for some of those ideas.

Individual pumped hydro locations scale well, there isn’t enough locations to make ~1,000 TW of pumped hydro thus it doesn’t scale.

Compressed air and thermal aren’t economically viable, which is why decades after introduction there isn’t large scale deployments of the stuff.

> Any sort of heat utilization or recapture massively increases efficiency for some of those ideas.

Low grade heat has minimal to zero economic value. This is why nuclear power plants need to build cooling towers etc rather than having something useful to do with all that heat energy. There’s some very niche utility, but it’s competing with other extremely cheap sources of heat like solar thermal which itself has barely catch on despite rapid payback periods.

You’re being very dishonest again, and are consistently portraying things in the worst light possible. An individual system of pump hydro can be built much larger than any realistic battery facility. There are enough viable locations that it will scale better than batteries. You need to let this go and stop BSing.

There was no need for compressed air or thermal energy storage until recently. In fact, there were no large scale battery energy storage systems until recently either. All of them are starting to happen.

Your point about low grade heat is entirely a red herring. It’s not even true as storage of low grade heat is valuable in a renewable energy world. But more importantly those energy storage can definitely store higher grades of heat. Especially if it is hot enough to drive a turbine, or used to that heat to make other systems more efficient. In large scale facilities, it is not meaningfully less efficient that batteries. So the conclusion is the same: there does not really need to be batteries for this purpose. You can eliminate them and save yourself the money. After all, you already admitted that you need those other systems anyways, so just have those other systems and not bother with batteries.