Comment by 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.
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?
We can make an effectively unlimited amount of battery storage, especially sodium ion or iron air (which don't need ocean floor mining...). There are no practical limits on the timescales of ~10-20 years.
What people forget is batteries are a manufactured good, which follows Wright's Law. Manufactured goods (like energy storage, TVs, lightbulbs) obey different economic principles to scarce goods (like land, services, or goods with scarce inputs), and they have effectively unlimited supply. The supply is strictly set by demand.
Aggressive predictions of ~6-10TWh/year of batteries in 2030 are more predictions of demand, not so much predictions of supply. If market demand in 2030 is 30TWh/year, then that's what the market will produce. But don't blame manufacturers for the fact that demand in 2030 will only be 6-10TWh/year! And don't confuse this for a sector's inability to increase supply!
The response when seeing a "6-10TWh/year" prediction should be "how can we incentivize demand so that this number is 30TWh/year instead".
You didn't address the need for rare earth metals. Can you link sources talking about the 'unlimited amounts of battery storage'? I was also under the impression (albeit uninformed) that battery storage was not a solved problem, either technically or ecologically.
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Hang on. So the reaction to companies intending to perform actions that will destroy the economy system of the oceans is to prevent more demand? Why this instead of just forbidding that mining?
Well without that mining batteries will run out of cost effective materials quite quick and temper the ability to hit the demand necessary to decarbonize the grid. There’s also complicated legal matters since a lot of this happens in international waters. Oh, and the body that nominally regulates the matter has been clearly regulatory captured and is handing out mining licenses left and right. So while it might be nice to hypothesize what a sensible regulatory framework might look like, what’s actually happening is “full steam ahead” mining. It’s really bleak.