Comment by amarait
2 days ago
What replaces fossil fuels is some kind of breakthrough in batteries. At the moment its getting better every year were currently at less than $100 per KWh which is crazy but needs to be improved for allowing more off the grid energy consumption
The lesson from solar is that it won't be "a breakthrough" but the gradual accumulation of a thousand different efforts at cost-shaving across the whole supply chain making batteries gradually but inexorably cheaper.
There won't be fanfare when fixed batteries start using sodium chemistry rather than lithium, for example, but that will start happening across the next few years.
Batteries are just one means to store renewable energy and mechanical storage is another. Re-designing the power grid to transfer peak to areas via HVDC is another, to spread into areas where the weather limits or constricts the renewables for that time of day or day itself.
"Taming the Sun" [0] goes into more details and talks about it better than I can.
People like to over simplifying complexity by reducing arguments to a single reasoning. It helps make everything seem more simple than it really is. It is a way to persuade people that lack understanding "all systems are complex". Even instructions on how to construct a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. How many years does it take of development before a child can actually preform that "simple" task?
[0] https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262537070/taming-the-sun/
Better batteries are the road to replacing fossil fuels for transportation, but I feel like abundant nuclear energy is what we need to give a jump start to green steel, hydrogen, ammonia, etc, and electrifying bulk heating industrial processes.
you may feel that, but its not going to happen. nukes are too expensive, and thus the energy they produce is too expensive.
We are also going to need a breakthrough in how batteries are produced and disposed of. Otherwise the environmental impact of the many millions of batteries themselves may prove unsustainable too.
That would be nice indeed, but shouldn't prevent us from prioritizing reducing CO2 emissions first.
Maybe better disposal practices. Regulations standardizing batteries would also do a lot of good.
But really, we simply need a lot of virgin batteries regardless because we don't have enough. Recycling and disposal will only really take off once the market is mostly saturated (which we don't appear to be anywhere near).
I'd also point out that modern LiPo batteries are 90% recyclable with no special techniques needed. That's because by weight, the batteries are mostly iron and nickel. Recycling them is really as simple as just melting them down. It only gets tricky if you want to collect the lithium, silicon, and other trace materials (and there are already recycling plants that are handling that).
Funny how no one seems to consider the environmental impact of digging up fossil fuels when they discuss solar.
It's similar to how you can identify Real Bird Lovers. They stay silent when they see pictures of oil-covered birds after an Exxon Valdez or a Deepwater Horizon. Show them a windmill and boy do they get passionate about bird safety and welfare.
there's also a lot of wastes, with different urban planning and build code a lot of cooling and heating would be avoided
I think this is the most frustrating part. You wouldn't even need to massively change out neighborhoods to get a huge benefit. If a developer built with district and heating planned, you could have an entire neighborhood heated and cooled without needed AC and heaters in every building. You could still have single family homes that are massively more efficient per unit.
The problem is that has to be planned almost from the beginning. Which shouldn't be a huge deal. My neighborhood had a water tower built at the same time the neighborhood was built. There's no reason district heating couldn't have occupied the lot right next to it.
Does not necessarily need to be a battery. Flywheels, heat, and even synthesis of fuels are also solutions to the problem.
If you look at the energy density, cost/kwh, and lifetime maintenance of most of those, you'll find that batteries handily win. Further, batteries have room for innovation and growth in all those categories.
We won't, for example, make a more cost-efficient flywheel or heat storage. They are effectively as efficient as they'll ever be.
IMO, it necessarily has to be batteries. The other alternatives are nowhere near as good.
On the other hand, you need to buy a new set of batteries every 15 or so years. The other things you mentioned generally don't need regular replacement, and when they do, it's not the whole setup.
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At grid scale I'd imagine that pumped hydroelectric storage would beat batteries for TCO, but there are significant geographic constraints.
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We can either pray and wait for a technological breakthrough that makes storage tech way cheaper than gas or we can just use taxes and subsidies to make it happen now.
It's not so hard. Lavish subsidies were used to make nuclear power semi-sort-of-competitive even though it's way more expensive.
The same thing could have been done with solar and wind but apparently we thought the best course of action was just to wait until they became cheaper than coal without subsidies (& then Obama and Trump slammed solar with tariffs).
Or we can go full nuclear.
why? much more expensive, much slower. This reflexive "nukes are the only way" meme amongst technical folk really has gotta die.
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Get private insurance to fully cover nuclear and I'm onboard.
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could do but im not sure what there is to be gained from unnecessarily spending trillions more to decarbonize.
“We” are only in control of “us”. The rest of the world will keep burning fossil fuel
> The rest of the world will keep burning fossil fuel
As the article spends so many paragraphs to explain to us, the rest of the world is increasingly not burning fossil fuel for their new energy needs. Most of the fuel it burns is for the energy it already uses. And solar is starting to take a bite out of that too.
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I think the overall point is that we will never get there.
Renewables will never be cheap enough to fully replace fossil fuels, batteries will never be good enough.
No matter what, as long as the cost of extracting and burning fossil fuels is less than the result of what gets produced by the consumption, someone will be doing it.
It’s why crypto will never solve the energy issue. Why AI/GPT/LLM won’t either. Especially when the cost of that output is pegged to the cost of generating the above.
The price of LFP batteries in China is $35/kWh for cells, $52/kWh for fully integrated systems [1]. Roughly 1TW of solar is being deployed globally every year. We’re already there, it’s just a matter of pushing the pedal down harder. China destroys half a million barrels a day of global oil demand every year they build EVs at current output levels, which are still increasing.
Fossil fuels are already dead, it’s just time horizon. How fast we want to go is a function of how much fiat we want to shovel into PV solar and battery manufacturing.
[1] https://reneweconomy.com.au/watershed-moment-big-battery-sto...
But that isn’t the case _today_. Unless you have existing facilities (which we do have and which gives fossils momentum) it’s strictly cheaper to build new renewables! The problem for renewables is that the p99.9 price is much higher than the p95 price. But finance will be solving that part.
Citation:
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2025/07/01/solar-cost-of-electri...
you're just wrong. they already are cheap enough, its already happening. PV+battery is now cheaper than new gas & coal. Very soon to come, existing gas.