Comment by frotaur
4 days ago
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.
Well yes that is what happens when the market is left to its own devices and external costs aren't accounted for. The solution isn't to abandon storage it's to embrace the many options out there that don't require rare earths.
And it is all a demand side problem. If the world wanted to buy 10 or 20 TWh a year at current market prices, that's how much would be produced. But the world doesn't want to do that and hence that much isn't produced. This is Econ 101 for goods with non scarce inputs. It doesn't take ten years to scale up production for commodity goods.
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