The numbers given in article the world wide battery installations are predicted in 2040 to cover about 20 minutes of world electricity consumption assuming it would be equal close to 2016 figures, where majority of world is in relative poverty.
It definitely is at least two orders of magnitude too little to stop climate change.
People assume the reducing emissions would stop climate change. Nope, emissions are only related to rate of change not absolute value. Reducing emissions by 90% would only slow down the change, it reducing 99% would actually stop it, and it would need to be about 100% to slowly reverse the effects of what has been done by the time humanity gets there.
Energy Storage Investments Boom as Battery Costs Halve in the Next Decade
41–50 of 134 posts
Re: Energy Storage Investments Boom as Battery Costs Halve in the Next Decade
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Short term = diurnal Long term = weeks to seasonal Batteries, especially that sort of cheaper battery, would be great for diurnal load leveling. Long term storage is probably more hydrogen and mass thermal storage. The tradeoff would be capital cost per unit stored energy vs. efficiency. Storage competes with and complements two other approaches: overinstallation of generation capacity w. curtailment, and dispatchabl…
> Long term storage is probably more hydrogen and mass thermal storage. I was thinking about how multiple big heating packs[1] would stack up. Seems the Wikipedia reference[2] has the topic well covered. Tricky but possible. And apparently (duh) not a novel idea by any means[3][4]. Though the references I could find were mostly for home-size installations or for actual heating packs. Here in Norway we're blessed with…
I was thinking more in terms of artificial geothermal. The time constant for a sphere of bedrock to cool off goes as the square of the radius, and can easily be made to be many years. These would be very large installations, of course.
Re: Energy Storage Investments Boom as Battery Costs Halve in the Next Decade
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm familiar with the concept of seasons, just as I'm familiar with the concept of yearly boat trips. But lots of people live near the equator, just like lots of people don't really ever go for long drives so rather than focus on one particularly difficult case and then giving up I was looking for some kind of rough quantification of the problem. In analogy I'm just wondering whether the equivalent of the "daily comm…
Equatorial weather patterns are not all that relevant because most of the energy consumption is at higher latitudes which experience significant seasonality. And your daily commute/boat towing "analogy" is not really helpful because those problems are not comparable. Boat towing is an optional luxury and can be worked around at a slight inconvenience by visiting charging stations. Lack of long-term storage on the oth…
95% of the world population lives below 50 degrees N/S.
And I suspect if seasonality really does become a problem that's costly to solve, heavy industry will move down toward the equator. Ship the finished products rather than try to make them where it doesn't make sense to.
Re: Energy Storage Investments Boom as Battery Costs Halve in the Next Decade
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there any storage mechanism whose costs don't increase in the same way?
Anything that involves volumes and abundant resources. E.g. storing hydrogen or compressed air in a salt dome decouples the power rating of your storage (MW) from the storage capacity (MWh). Similarly hydroelectric dams contain water by volume but you only need to dam a cross-section of the valley.
> Similarly hydroelectric dams contain water by volume but you only need to dam a cross-section of the valley.
I would caution that the cost of a dam does not increase linearly, either (and that most resources that are profitably dammable at utility scale have already been dammed)
Re: Energy Storage Investments Boom as Battery Costs Halve in the Next Decade
#45The numbers given in article the world wide battery installations are predicted in 2040 to cover about 20 minutes of world electricity consumption assuming it would be equal close to 2016 figures, where majority of world is in relative poverty. It definitely is at least two orders of magnitude too little to stop climate change. People assume the reducing emissions would stop climate change. Nope, emissions are only r…
I actually work on reducing emissions tangentially and am absolutely not a "denier", but I have not seen any evidence that our models are so accurate that we can predict the tipping point from halting increases to decreases within 1%.
Re: Energy Storage Investments Boom as Battery Costs Halve in the Next Decade
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there any storage mechanism whose costs don't increase in the same way?
Anything that involves volumes and abundant resources. E.g. storing hydrogen or compressed air in a salt dome decouples the power rating of your storage (MW) from the storage capacity (MWh). Similarly hydroelectric dams contain water by volume but you only need to dam a cross-section of the valley.
Wouldn't the above description also fit flow batteries?
Re: Energy Storage Investments Boom as Battery Costs Halve in the Next Decade
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Short term solution: natural gas peaker plants could be repurposed to provide power during lulls in production (better than most fossil fuels, but very expensive and still produce greenhouse gases, so can't be the solution for long) Medium term solution: long-distance transmission, overprovision, and even more grid-scale storage (whole continents don't get cloudy & calm at once for long periods of time) Potential lon…
Wont introducing net energy to the earth add to the warming?
Yes, it would (though an interesting comparison would be ground-based renewables vs. carbon capturing land use + space based solar).
Another possible long-term, space-based alternative to reduce global warming would be space-based manufacturing. It's equally as plausible - if the economics work for space-based solar, it means either space-based-manufacturing is a thing, or launch costs have dramatically lowered
Re: Energy Storage Investments Boom as Battery Costs Halve in the Next Decade
#48For long term energy storage batteries are not ideal. Their costs increase linearly with time of storage and amount of storage. Peak shaving is an OK use for them, though.
What percentage of our global storage needs do you believe are "long term" in this dichotomy? Is this at the "electric cars can't do my daily commute" or "electric cars can't tow my boat 600 miles without stopping, once a year" stage? Seems like most of the world just needs solar to last until the next day with a decent chunk of that power needed immediately after the sun sets and any wind power available could get s…
>Seems like most of the world just needs solar to last until the next day
as long as it's not cloudy for a week
Re: Energy Storage Investments Boom as Battery Costs Halve in the Next Decade
#49The numbers given in article the world wide battery installations are predicted in 2040 to cover about 20 minutes of world electricity consumption assuming it would be equal close to 2016 figures, where majority of world is in relative poverty. It definitely is at least two orders of magnitude too little to stop climate change. People assume the reducing emissions would stop climate change. Nope, emissions are only r…
"..cover about 20 minutes of world electricity consumption..."
That seems like a meaningless metric. No one is designing a global battery system to power the entire planet. What matters is how battery systems integrate with generation systems.
"People assume the reducing emissions would stop climate change..."
Why do you assume people assume this?
Re: Energy Storage Investments Boom as Battery Costs Halve in the Next Decade
#50The numbers given in article the world wide battery installations are predicted in 2040 to cover about 20 minutes of world electricity consumption assuming it would be equal close to 2016 figures, where majority of world is in relative poverty. It definitely is at least two orders of magnitude too little to stop climate change. People assume the reducing emissions would stop climate change. Nope, emissions are only r…
I actually work on reducing emissions tangentially and am absolutely not a "denier", but I have not seen any evidence that our models are so accurate that we can predict the tipping point from halting increases to decreases within 1%.
You're probably right, but that's really nothing good. Our models are poor and despite not knowing where irrecoverable tipping points lie exactly, we blast full steam ahead with our emissions.