Comment by bluGill

4 days ago

20 years ago I would have agreed with you. However today we have proof that wind and solar work, are cheap, and are useful. The world doesn't need fusion or fission, other technology is plenty good.

Unless you can do a science fiction thing of turning off the sun, and harvesting the hydrogen in it to power local reactors in earth orbit to provide the energy (light) we need without letting the vast majority escape our solar system unused. Otherwise that big fusion reactor in the sky provides all the energy we need.

37 comments

bluGill

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legitster  4 days ago

Wind and solar power are proving very cheap and good at the margin, but it doesn't solve for the massive needs of a modern grid. Unlike plants, we do not necessarily have the option of turning society off when it's not sunny or windy.

Energy storage is far from a solved problem. Tesla produces ~40 gigawatts of storage capacity an entire year. California alone consumes ~800 gigawatts of power in a day. Even if Tesla dedicated every bit of lithium it had to building storage capacity for just one state, and demand didn't increase, it would realistically still take over a decade to keeping the lights on purely with renewables for a 24 hour period. At which point the first battery packs would be nearing the end of their service life.

  • energy123  4 days ago

    This is an incredibly misinformed and outdated opinion. Tesla produces 40 gigawatts of storage capacity only because demand for storage capacity is currently quite low, and because China is more cost effectively producing storage. As demand increases, production will increase to match demand.

    Most states currently only care about installing solar and wind -- not storage -- because they are still majority fossil fuels, and at the current moment it makes no sense to install storage if you still have fossil fuel to dislodge. The only exception is really California, who are installing storage, but their bottleneck is not the market's ability to deliver enough supply.

    There are also many storage options beyond lithium ion if you only spent a moment to look.

    • nradov  4 days ago

      Grid scale storage holds potential but for now it isn't economically viable for industrial base load. Residential customers are probably manageable but factories and data centers have to run 24×7: they can't shut down just because the sun isn't shining and wind isn't blowing. It's clear that the USA has to rapidly reindustrialize if we want to keep having stuff. For political and demographic reasons we won't be able to count on China as a reliable supplier much longer. Domestic electricity demand is going to grow much faster than the storage supply can keep up. The only realistic current options for that base load are a mix of fission and natural gas.

      Maybe fusion will be an alternative someday but for now it's just a fantasy. We need to act based on what's proven to work today.

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  • jonah  4 days ago

    There are so many more cost-effective grid-scale options like pumped storage. I think it's daft to "waste" the energy density of lithium batteries on stationary applications.

    • pfdietz  4 days ago

      Battery storage has become cheaper than pumped hydro, I believe, at least for diurnal storage. The price declines in Li-ion cells have been remarkable, particularly recent decline in LFP cell prices.

  • gpm  4 days ago

    Battery production/year is following an exponential curve right now. Tons of new research on promising new directions is continually being produced and incorporated into batteries. Projecting only continued production at the current rate isn't "realistic", it's wildly pessimistic.

    • vlovich123  4 days ago

      The total electricity grid requirements are also growing - it’s at 30TWh annually and before the AI explosion was ~2-3% (let’s conservatively estimate 2030 as 40TWh). Let’s say 20% of that is satisfied direct from renewables without storage leaving 32TWh.

      Aggressive predictions have us generating ~6-10TWh of batteries by 2030 meaning we’re going to still need about another 3-6 years to actually satisfy demand (ignoring complexity of hooking up the batteries). On top of that, the batteries require rare earth metals that companies are gearing up to satisfy by strip mining the ocean floor for those polymetallic nodules, operations which have a very real risk of completely destroying deep ocean life. It seems to me like it’s slow and ecologically potentially more destructive than even global warming. Is it really wise to be betting on batteries at this scale vs tried and true nuclear fission which doesn’t carry any of these risks?

      8 replies →

  • roenxi  4 days ago

    Also if we're planning for the long term; wind and solar sound like bad options for going into major global catastrophes like large asteroid hits or a nuclear war. It'd be better as a matter of principle to be using systems that can cope with massive climate disruptions. I like to bring up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer - an event like that will happen sooner or later and it'd be pretty rough if we've all gone too heavy with solar.

    One of those hopefully-you-don't-need-it concerns but it is starting to become a more pressing with the uptick in wars and unrest that seems to be going on.