The first step is just to build enough renewables and enough battery to last one average day. That gets you to 95% of reducing CO2. Then you can think about if it even makes sense to replace those cloudy yet/windless days.

We just need to spend on the most economic places to save CO2.

World electricity consumption is 60,000 GWh per day. "Last one average day" is much greater than existing battery production can satisfy - it's around 40x annual battery production to achieve just 12 hours of storage. And that's ignoring the fact that electric vehicles are consuming the vast majority of battery production. Making any serious efforts towards grid-storage would set back EV adoption.

It doesn't have to be so bleak.

- Every EV purchased can be part of the solution by supporting vehicle to grid charging.

- Annual production capacity can increase. IEA estimates 6,000 GWh per year will be manufactured in 2030. I am sure it will grow further.

- We need way less than 60,000 GWh to provide batteries for an average day, because solar, wind, hydro are covering part of this.

Using EV as grid storage is not feasible. One, many vehicles are used for business, utilities, and public transit. So they'll be driven during the day, and charged at night. This is going to increase load during hours of non-production, the opposite of storage. Two, no san grid operator is going to accept a situation where much of their storage capacity will just drive away for vacation, or in anticipation of a disaster. The predicted exponential rise is still an order of magnitude less than the scale required, and the vast majority of it is not going to grid storage.

Wind is subject to intermittency, too. It's not a magic bullet that eliminates storage. Unless you're overprovisioning wind by a factor of 10 (in which case it's not cheap anymore), you'll still have weeks-long stretches where there is insufficient energy.

Hydro is really the only non-intermittent carbon-free energy source besides geothermal and nuclear power. The reality is that wind and solar are only cheap in the context of a non-intermittent source that can fill in for the intermittency of renewable production. Running a minority of your grid on solar and wind, supplementing gas plants is one thing. Running a grid mostly wind and solar is totally different beast.

But you can't deny the reality that the electricity supply is rapidly changing and that the issues of non-intermittency are turn out as not so relevant than anticipated. We have the existing non-intermittent power plants and can use them if we need to. Batteries are helping us rely less on them and since cost of batteries and PV/wind is trending so strongly down, it is already happening that many markets prefer batteries over using gas/coal plants.

This will push down CO2 emittance. That all that matters really (at reasonable cost).

> We have the existing non-intermittent power plants and can use them if we need to.

Not if you want to solve climate change. Reducing emissions to 50% of present levels and then just keeping them there isn't going to prevent climate change. Overproduction during peak hours doesn't help unless you have a way to release that energy in non-peak hours.

Again, growing battery production isn't actually resulting in grid storage. Even dedicating 100% of battery production to grid storage isn't going to make significant changes in grid storage, but it will stop EV adoption.

Sorry this just false. Battery deployment for electricity grid storage is progressing with unprecedented and accelerating speed. We will solve this.

It just requires some money. If you research it, it is surprisingly little in relation to global annual GDP (at least less than I was expecting).

> Sorry this just false. Battery deployment for electricity grid storage is progressing with unprecedented and accelerating speed.

And what, exactly, is that speed? The US plans to deploy "15GW" (presumably the authors mean GWh of storage, GW is not a unit of storage) of grid storage in 2024. That's less than 2 minutes of storage!

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61202#:~:tex....

Again, global battery production is only about 6-700 GWh (be careful with figures that cite capacity, which is distinct from actual production). And very little of that is dedicated to grid storage.

Those figures are about maximum dispatchable power usually for a time of more than 1 hour (2 to 4 seems typical).

So 16 GW battery allow you to power the US similarly to 3x times the power of the largest US nuclear reactor for probably 3 hours.

If such projects are economically feasible now, the economics are just getting better and better and this means we will see exponential growth. California is seeing improved grid stability and reduction in CO2 emissions due to batteries today.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/05/07/climate/batte...

Somewhere between 4 and 8 minutes worth of storage deployed over the span of a whole year is not even remotely close to feasible. Even diurnal storage to even out solar production will require 8-12 hours worth of storage. Seasonal intermittency will require days or even weeks.

Since 2020, battery prices have gone flat. Moore's law works because computers get faster as transistors get smaller. That's not the case for batteries, or most other goods. A new car cost a million dollars in 1900, $100k in 1910, and $10K in 1920. Would it have been reasonable to assume that a new car would cost $10 by 1950? Of course not, the steel and rubber in the car is worth much more than $10. A car cannot cost less than the input materials used to build it.

Input materials account for 75% of the cost of a battery already (https://www.visualcapitalist.com/breaking-down-the-cost-of-a...) The room for further price reductions become ever more slim.