Comment by idiotsecant
12 hours ago
>With sufficiently cheap storage, no transmission is needed.
This logic eats its own tail. Yes, if battery storage was cheap a lot of things would be monumentally better. It isn't. We need today solutions, not hypothetical ones.
The batteries are already cheap enough, per kWh deferred over their lifetimes, to make a huge difference. Like, "97% of the problem can be solved without requiring a single new invention" kind of difference.
The current limiting factor is the number of factories making batteries, not the cost per deferred kWh of the batteries they do make.
Progress marches on: Chemical Process Produces Critical Battery Metals With No Waste https://spectrum.ieee.org/nmc-battery-aspiring-materials
Energy storage technology is on a roll, and grid storage isn't limited by weight energy density in the same manner as vehicle batteries are.
There have been articles like this for decades. Yes, batteries will get incrementally cheaper and incrementally better. They will get better slower than climate change gets worse.