Hacker News Reader

Comment by xiphias2 | Hacker News Reader

It's sad, but as nuclear isn't happening, the only hope we have is the continued scaling of battery production for renewable grid.

View on HN

Battery production isn't set to be anywhere near the scale required. Current production is 300GWh per year globally [1]. Production is projected to reach 2TWh per year at ~2030. How much capacity is needed for a country to be powered by intermittent sources varies, but most estimates are 2-3 days worth of energy consumption depending on the breakdown between wind and solar. For reference, the US uses 10TWh of electricity daily. Hydroelectric or pumped air storage have better capacities, but those are geographically limited. Some have drawn up theoretical plans around using the Sabatier process to create methane, but that has unsolved issues of how to effectively capture CO2 from the exhaust of gas turbines as well as round trip efficiencies of ~35%.

I foresee countries saturating daytime energy generation with solar, and then twiddling around their thumbs for a few decades before either adopting nuclear power or just saying screw it and keep burning fossil fuels.

1 https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/14/global-lithium-ion-batt...

10 year projections are mostly off by an order of magnitude.

Wright's law (https://ark-invest.com/research/wrights-law-predicts-teslas-... https://ark-invest.com/research/wrights-law-2 ) predicts that as electric cars get competitive with gasoline cars in a few years, production will accerelate in the middle of the decade. As batteries get cheaper by about 18%/year, production can ramp up by 30-50%/year

If you use 30%/year for battery production increase, you arrive at 4TWh/year at ~2030. For 50%/year production increase you get 17TWh/year.

There's a reason why I'm really excited for Tesla's battery day, as they clearly want to get closer to 50%/year and not 30%/year production increase.

Price and global production capacity are two different figures. Global capacity is limited by things like raw materials. Regardless even if we go with your more optimistic projections, you're still talking about 5-7 years of global battery production to fulfill the storage demands of a single country. Consider that a large part of this battery production will go towards electric cars and electronics, it'll likely take the better part of a century to produce enough storage to power the globe on intermittent sources.

,,it'll likely take the better part of a century to produce enough storage to power the globe on intermittent sources''

We're talking about 20-30 years, and sure, I don't see the will from people (especially poor people who elect politicians, but can't afford renewable energy) for going faster.

We're not talking 20-30 years. Even by your more optimistic estimate of 4TWh of global battery production by 2030, it would still take 5-7 years worth of global battery production supply to fulfill just the United States' storage needs. Currently the US accounts for ~17% of global energy consumption, but that share is going to be lower in the future as less developed countries expand their energy production capacity. And on top of that, we're not going to be dedicating the entirety of our battery production to energy storage because we'll still be building electronics and electric vehicles.

Despite the unfortunate state of the industry at the moment and in recent memory, it should be noted that nuclear still counts for a significantly larger share of global energy supply than renewables ever have, and also has contributed more emissions reductions (vs. fossil fuels) than any other source.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com