Once cheap intermittent sources have saturated the market during peak production, further construction of intermittent sources will do nothing to displace the other 50% of demand that will continue to be fulfilled by fossil fuels. And then we either keep burning fossil fuels and wait until a storage breakthrough happens, or we start building non-intermittent sources of decarbonized energy.

Or we just raise taxes on the fossil fuels until they stop being burned. This will have to be done anyway (along with CO2 tariffs to isolate countries that refuse to do so.)

After that, storage gets rolled out. Nuclear never makes sense, and eventually the existing NPPs go away.

We raise taxes on fossil fuels, and then what? More investment in intermittent sources works until peak production is saturated. But now thanks to fuel taxes, lithium becomes a lot more expensive to mine since the heavy machinery is more expensive to fuel. Taxes on fossil fuels would reduce emissions, mostly by contracting the economy. It doesn't translate into more storage build out, and it certainly doesn't solve the orders-of-magnitude mismatch between the amount of storage available and the amount of storage required to smooth out intermittent sources.

Raw lithium is a small fraction of the cost of battery, using recent costs your looking at ~4% of total battery price from low purity lithium. People focus on it because of the name rather than nickel-cobalt-manganese or whatever the specific chemistry actually used. They also confuse mining costs with manufacturing costs when looking at ultra pure lithium ready for use in batteries but that’s like conflating the cost of 99.999% pure monocrystalline silicon with the cost of silicon in glass.

Batteries don’t need much Lithium and the stuff is more abundant than lead, tin, iodine, mercury, etc.

Cathode material is half the cost of a lithium battery. Manufacturing is only 24%.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/breaking-down-the-cost-of-a...

“The cathode material determines the capacity and power of a battery, typically composed of lithium and other battery metals.”

Also, the cost of a battery cell isn’t the cost of a battery pack, let alone the cost of all the associated equipment, land, installation, etc needed for grid scale batteries which is what matters here.

Wind + solar + hydro can go well past 50% without any batteries. Batteries are getting ever less expensive and production just keeps ramping up even faster.

We really don’t need any major breakthroughs beyond economies of scale to see sub 7c/kWh rates 24/7/365. People are already deploying 50% battery backed solar because it’s cost competitive vs both base load and peaking power.

Hydroelectricity alone can produce 100% of some countries electricity, but other countries can't produce any [1]. Hydropower is geographically limited, in that you need the right combination of a river and a valley to build a dam. You can't just scale out hydroelectric power.

No country produces the majority of its electricity from wind and solar. Australia produces the 15% and 13% of its electricity from solar and wind respectively. Denmark produces 2.5% and 42% from wind and solar [1].

Unfortunately, battery prices have stopped dropping and started increasing [2].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewable...

2. https://about.bnef.com/blog/lithium-ion-battery-pack-prices-...

> No country produces the majority of its electricity from wind and solar.

Yet, but infrastructure lasts far longer than the recent dip in prices which favors renewable energy. As to battery costs that article specifically mentions expectations of near term drop in prices, these are long term trends not specific annual guarantees. Solar prices have occasionally increased due to supply shortages even in the middle of vast longer term price drops.

Also, countries electric grids aren’t independent outside of a few islands.

Globally Hydropower is ~16% of global electricity generation and quite flexible. A country with 100% hydropower generation can easily add wind and solar panels and then export flexible and cheap hydroelectric energy. In fact if you look at countries running over 50% of hydroelectric power they tend to export quite a bit.