Comment by energy123
5 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This is an incredibly misinformed and outdated opinion.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.
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.
"Base load" can be achieved with renewables, batteries and natural gas. There have been lots of simulation studies demonstrating this. Not only is it achievable, it's also significantly cheaper and faster than fission with natural gas, even after accounting for all costs related to renewables such as the need for more transmission lines. This is especially true in the United States, which is uniquely blessed with abundant solar resources and well diversified wind resources.
Fission as a solution is something that is popular on social media, for reasons that are utterly mystifying to me. The arguments are invariably a few words that reach sweeping conclusions with no actual data backing it up, and lots of data contradicting it that the individual appears oblivious to.
I suspect the main reason fission is having a resurgence of popularity is because it maintains the current power structure of a rare large facilities controlled by a handful of actors. This has obvious advantages if you are a rich person concerned about keeping wealth concentrated into a few sets of hands.
Renewables are by their nature much more distributed in space, which makes them much harder to enclose and control in the way required to reproduce the current structure, especially as they are mainly being built by challengers who aren't really interested of forming monopolies with the fossil industry.
Well it's theoretically possible to supply industrial base load with battery storage but with the rate that demand is growing and the constraints on battery manufacturing that just won't be realistic for many years to come. How many battery cells does it take to keep a steel mill running through the night, and how will that impact power prices for large customers? As for natural gas, we're going to increasingly need that as a chemical feed stock to sustain the reindustrialization. So that leaves fission as the only known long-term option for sustainably meeting a large increase in base load demand.
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"we can get clean energy by continuing to burn fossil fuels".
If this isn't about ceasing carbon emissions then none of this is necessary. Fire up the coal plants!
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