Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power

There's the issue of space as well : I seem to recall you'd basically need to cover the whole country in wind/solar farms to make up for the loss of a few nuclear plants.

"Economics of the Fuel Cycle" by Guillaume De Roo & John E. Parsons

http://www.mit.edu/~jparsons/Presentations/090501%20CEEPR%20...

See slide 18 for the key result:

"Closed cycle costs are higher by 42%"

This slide deck also gives references to more detailed reports.

Fans of traveling wave reactors, molten salt reactors, and other not-actually-operating reactors will quote rosily low cost projections despite the lack of any empirical evidence. They're not worth arguing with. If/when commercial TWRs or MSRs actually exist, then we can compare costs. Right now the advanced reactor cost claims are on par with Battery Breakthrough of the Week stories about how a laboratory experiment could revolutionize energy in 10 years, if it's followed up with a lot of funding and absolutely no problems crop up along the way.

Not sure if I missed it but didn’t see anything in your source to back up this 7 years worth of battery production requirement for what the US needs in stationary storage. Without seeing how we got to the number, I’m skeptical. Things worth considering:

1) decommissioned battery packs from electric cars will eventually have 2nd lives on the grid

2) the manufacturing capacity of li-ion globally today is paltry compared what’s needed just in the batteries for mobility, let alone grid storage. Just like underestimations done for solar and wind, I expect current projections to be undershooting where we’ll end up

3) effective demand response (ramping up and down variable loads like commercial refrigeration, heating water, among others) based on renewable generation levels can effectively replace large chunks of battery storage requirements.

4) wind and solar generation profiles compliment each other - when it is usually sunny, it’s not too windy and when it’s colder (night, winter) wind generates more. Add in negative energy prices in periods of excess generation / curtailment - that is economic opportunity for energy storage to come in and capture value

5) li-ion batteries as they are today are effective for “peak shifting” applications of moving energy across a few hours, but not across weeks or even across seasons. Where it is applicable, pumped hydro and other tech can better fill those other spaces - but we can still make lots of progress prior to those ramping up.

6)Investing in broadening the connectedness of grids across states / countries / continents is another way to reduce generation variability with renewables as across, say North America - it may not be very windy in one state at a given moment but 1000mi away it could be either sunny or windy elsewhere. Smoothing the generation across geographies and types ( connecting hydro and nuclear to more grids) is another way to reduce the amount of energy storage required on a grid.

> Not sure if I missed it but didn’t see anything in your source to back up this 7 years worth of battery production requirement for what the US needs in stationary storage.

The source is a curve of projected battery production. You take the integral of the curve. The US consumes 4TWh of electricity per day. 3 days of storage is 12 TWh. The 3 day capacity estimate already includes solar and wind generation complementing each other. Wind can produce energy at night, but is more variable over the long term.

Decommissioned battery packs don't change global lithium ion battery production. We're currently producing 300GWh of battery capacity each year. Even if we stopped making electric vehicles and electronics and dedicated 100% of global battery production to grid storage we'd still have 40 years to reach 30TWh at current production capacity. Production capacity is projected to increase year over year so the overall time to reach this capacity would be less. But it's still nowhere remotely feasible, especially when you consider that we can't actually dedicate 100% of battery production capacity to grid storage.

This is even further compounded by the fact that batteries wear out after a few thousand cycles. There are theoretical ways to recycle batteries, but we'd need to recycle them in extremely large capacities.

The notion that battery storage is remotely feasible comes from the erroneous idea that technologies applicable to household use can scale up to heavy industry. This is not the case. This is why places like Germany and California hit a wall and have been unable to generate more than 50% of their energy from carbon free sources. It's no possible without highly scalable storage. And the only storage we have that's remotely scalable is geographically limited (hydro).

Biogas is a renewable. And contributes 5% to Germanys energy load, at baseload capability, still being made more and more flexible. You may not like it but it is definitely there. Hydro by the way also destroys vast stretches of land and creates rivers that are poor in aquatic life. Nuclear plants also heat up local water ways. In Heidelberg, we had the local river Neckar freeze for the first time in 40 years after the nuclear plant upstream shut down.

At this point, nobody that is serious is talking about 100% renewables. As is 100% nuclear which has similar problems of being inflexible. However, not all of this has to be battery storage, having a power full, europe-wide grid is equally important. Without that already now when they are still allowed, nuclear plants have shut down at times voluntarily because there was no demand. Phasing out nuclear may not have been the smartest of all moves, but its still far from the top ten of most stupid moves done in the german energy strategy. And especially not in the top ten of the most stupid moves of the conservative party.