Comment by nradov
4 days ago
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.
Your one and only argument is that supply of batteries cannot keep up with demand. This is not only false, it's actually the inverse of the truth, due to Wright’s Law.
Current supply of storage matches current demand. Supply is low only because demand is low. However, as demand increases, supply will continue to match demand, and moreover the price will actually decrease because of the fact that the learning curve is a function of production volume.
This has been a steady empirical phenomenon for 30+ years, and it's predicted by basic economics principles. It's not going to change now!
This is true for all battery types, but especially for sodium ion and iron air, which are constituted of abundant materials. Sodium ion in particular has very similar behavior and cost to lithium ion.
This confusion you're having is you seem to be conflating manufactured goods (like batteries) with scarce goods like land or services, whereby there's a fixed supply that can't be increased and where Wright's Law doesn't apply. This is not correct.
Storage is more like televisions or light bulbs, where you can basically make as much of it as you want, and the price will keep declining as more is made. And supply will always be there for demand, whatever the level of demand happens to be (in this case, a lot).
> 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?
Steel mills run when power is cheap. They historically have run at night (and only minimum power during the day) because cheap power is available at night. Of course there are lots of different steel mills, older ones can't shut down - but modern ones don't run 24x7, they run when power is cheap. Even the old 24x7 ones did their yearly maintenance in December - when power demand is highest (Christmas lights).
Wind and solar are easially predicted a few days in advance with high accuracy, and thus the mills change their shifts/output to follow the cheap power. If it is cloudy/no wind they will send their employees home (with pay) or do maintenance for that week while waiting on more cheaper energy. It takes a tremendous amount of energy to melt iron and so they manage this carefully because it makes them money. They can't deal with months of no production, but they can manage a week here and there.
Battery manufacturing has to be at massive scale even in a nuclear powered world, just to supply battery electric vehicles.
Converting every passenger car and light truck in the US to a BEV would involve enough batteries to store something like two days of the average grid output, which is more than would be needed for a cost optimal wind/solar/battery/hydrogen system for a 100% renewable grid.
> Converting every passenger car and light truck in the US to a BEV would involve enough batteries to store something like two days of the average grid output, which is more than would be needed for a cost optimal wind/solar/battery/hydrogen system for a 100% renewable grid.
Assuming the power stored in these vehicles can be reclaimed by the grid anytime they want?
No, I was just pointing out the scale of the required battery manufacturing.
It's an argument I like to use. When someone claims "we can't use X because of reason Y, we have to do Z instead" I look to see if Z also is hit by objection Y.
Another example of this is "renewables require too much material that we can't recycle", at which point I observe that the quantity of materials produced by society as a whole greatly exceeds what renewables would involve, even if the society is powered by nuclear. The US produces 600 megatons of construction and demolition waste a year, for example. Renewable waste would just be a minor blip on this existing waste stream. So, either recycling this waste isn't actually needed, or a putative sustainable nuclear-powered society has discovered how to recycle it, so just toss the renewable waste (which is almost entirely things like steel, aluminum, and glass) into that same recycling infrastructure.