Unfortunately, current policies are often based on predictions from a few years ago.
Once the transition to EV's is mostly done and car sales fall to normal levels there will be an immense surplus of battery production capacity.
My understanding is also that LFP batteries have basically eliminated the raw materials bottleneck, which was another development that few analysts (or anyone else) were able to predict just a few years ago.
the casuality between the raw material supply bottleneck and LFP would be difficult to demonstrate. LFP has lower energy density and would have required more lithium to get equivalent KWh than what is normally required by high-energy, high-nickel batteries (eg, NCM/A); therefore higher lithium demand, but ...
The price of lithium, and other battery raw materials, however, plunged by 75% since last Novemember peak (still falling) -- it's widely understood that the drop is largely caused by slower than expected EV demand (and oversupply).
>> but I believe the reason for the slow drop is mostly because most of the battery factories currently under production are not online yet... <<
GM forecasted earlier this year that their (Ultium) cell cost would drop to $87/KWh by 2025; just last week, GM reported a 40% drop in their cell cost YoY. Sure, there is 400+GWh new US battery production coming up in 2025-2026 and the commodification/mass-production of made batteries would accelerate further price drop.
which was true for all kinds of stuff from construction materials to EVs last year -- the prices of battery raw materials, eg, lithium, nickel and cobalt, plunged by as much as 75% since last November peak.
For example, using things like clean hydrogen or Power-to-methane processes that can create gas to be used in existing peaker plants.
If there's no curtailment (and if you have sites available in the country) then pumped storage makes a lot more sense.
But either way, building sufficient storage to do anything other than peak-shave is very, very, very expensive, so we'd be better off with nuclear even at a 2-3x cost overrun.
We'd even be better off if all solar and wind power were converted into hydrogen first and only then turned into electricity. Not because thats cheap but because nuclear power is that expensive.
Nuclear power only becomes cost competitive when you use it to share costs with the nuclear-military industrial complex - which is why it is built.
Seasonal variation is best dealt with by creating and storing hydrogen underground. It's easy to store lots of MWhs this way. This isnt as efficient as a battery or pumped storage when roundtripped (~50% not 90%) but if seasonal variation is 4-7% of your power then that just means you'll have to overproduce in aggregate by 10-20% to accommodate this. That's not really a problem given how dirt cheap solar and wind are - about that much is being lost to curtailment already.
The funny thing is, even if all electricity generated by solar and wind were stored as gas before being used it would still work out a bit cheaper than nuclear power. Nuclear is that expensive.
Given that, it's not (currently) economically viable to build storage+PV on anything approaching the scale we would need to replace baseload generation completely.
4-7% isn't seasonal variation in PV production. It's the amount of grid energy that needs to be supplied under a hypothetical 100% solar/wind/pumped storage grid when:
* Solar output is low
* and wind output is low
* and ~8 hours of pumped storage is depleted.
Obviously the wind blows at night and pumped storage works at night and electricity demand is lower at night. Obviously seasonal storage would not have to be tapped every night.
>Given that, it's not (currently) economically viable to build storage+PV
Why would that be given? It's categorically false. The opposite is true. Maybe what you meant to say was that "GIVEN 2GW of solar energy was being produced today" AND "coire glas is under construction" because it's highly economically viable, maybe we should lend a hand in the form of subsidies in scaling that up?
Or did you want to push those subsidies to a form of energy with a 5x higher LCOE?
My concern is the "end game", where all current baseload generation gets disconnected from the grid (including current nuclear when it reaches end of life). Solar PV's current low LCOE doesn't help you a lot in that case because in order to actually deliver the energy needed at the right time you will need to do some combination of (1) build a lot more PV than "needed" and routinely curtail it significantly in summer (ie significantly derate nameplate capacity) and (2) build a lot more storage to deal with seasonal and other variations.
This is when nuclear starts to look like it makes sense as part of the energy mix in my view.
>Nuclear power doesnt store energy. It will pump out 2GW all the time whether you need 6GW or you need 0GW. It doesn't really help in that respect at all because it can't be scaled up and down. It's not a peaker.
i.e. nuclear power needs peakers or storage too. not as much as solar and wind but it still needs to be paired with peakers or storage.
>build a lot more storage to deal with seasonal and other variations.
This is what makes the most economic sense currently because pumped storage + hydrogen storage + solar + wind <<< nuclear power costs.
Even IF you assumed nuclear power plants could be peakers (they can't) or that Fukushima/Chernobyl events had a probability of 0% (they dont), it would still not make any economic sense to build thrm when those 4 technologies can handle everything together at a much cheaper cost and can be built in 1/2 - 1/20th the amount of time.
This is only true if you imagine batteries as the only storage technology. But complementary storage technologies, like hydrogen, allow 100% RE to be achieved at a cost that will likely be lower than what nuclear would allow.
Having said that, any future electricity mix must include nuclear power. France proves that only nuclear allows for deep decarbonization unless you have lots of hydropower and a small population like Norway.
For people who still think that wind and solar alone can do it, I just recommend looking at Germany which had to resort to restart even communist East Germany era coal plants to stabilize the grid after the nuclear phase out.
I think people are letting perfect be the enemy of good, sure they output carbon, but they seem like a much more affordable option for buffering dips in renewables output, compared to batteries or nuclear.
Unless by "gas" you meant green hydrogen.