Comment by energy123
4 days ago
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.
There is no need for rare earth metals for stationary storage. See sodium ion, which performs similar to lithium ion batteries and are only slightly more expensive (but that cost differential has nothing to do with the product itself, it's because of economies of scale and Wright's Law has been operating on lithium ion for longer).
Lithium ion is preferred for vehicles because it's lighter, but again we are talking about stationary storage, so the extra weight of sodium ion isn't a problem.
The technology is solved, and the materials needed to make it abundant. It's all about demand. If the demand is there, the industrial capacity will follow. But right now, the market is only demanding about 3TWh/year of storage, and so that's how much industry is producing.
> The technology is solved, and the materials needed to make it abundant. It's all about demand. If the demand is there, the industrial capacity will follow
It takes a lot of time for new battery technologies to scale and disrupt existing ones and entrenched players have an incentive to continue competing. Sodium ion, iron air etc might replace lithium ion on the 30 year time scale but lithium ion will continue to drive down costs and up its capacity to try to compete and it has significantly more revenue to fund this by being the only player in the market. So it’s not clear when alternative batteries will start to replace lithium ion, but at scale it’s unlikely to be a quick process. And please don’t pretend like it’s all a demand side problem. It takes time to build out new factories from manufacturing all the equipment needed to acquiring and training employees. There’s plenty of demand for cheap batteries and the ability to manufacture simply isn’t there either and it’s being brought online. Oh and that capacity being added? It’s all lithium ion and requires a long pay off for that investment. Lithium ion is going to be potential a significant ecological debt worse than fossil fuels if the ocean floor strip mining gets going.
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