I think you missed the point: even for diurnal storage the scale required amounts to a decade's worth of global battery production just to create capacity equal to 1/4th of just the US's daily electricity usage.
This is a very lame argument. Manufacturing capacity isn't some fixed constant of nature, it's whatever makes sense given the market for the product. So if there's a large market, a large manufacturing capacity will be created.
Even if we assume that the production capacity will continuously increases at the predicted rate, think you missed the part where that was just the US's storage requirements. Global electricity consumption annually was 22.3 PWh in 2017, yielding 61TWh per day. And while battery production increases, so too does electricity demand. Even if we assume that battery production increases to 1TWh-2TWh per year by 2030 as per your link we're still taking about decades to achieve even 1/4th of the current (not 2030) daily electricity consumption even if 100% of battery production was dedicated to grid storage. And that's not possible because grid storage is going to be competing with electric vehicles and electronics. And again, by 2030 were going to be using more electricity than we are currently. The necessary capacity is increasing exponentially. Pointing out that battery production is predicted to increase doesn't alter the fact that the scale required is massive.
And this all this is ignoring the fact that batteries lose half their capacity after 300-500 cycles. Even if we're generous and say 1000 cycles that's still just 3 years for diurnal use (daily charge and discharge cycles).
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> I didn't miss that. Why do you think global manufacturing capacity will stop when it reaches what the US needs, and not expand to satisfy the global market? You think the manufactures are going to leave sales and profits on the table for no good reason
I can ask you the same thing: why do you think that global battery manufacturing capacity is unlimited? What makes you think that we'll have an unlimited supply of raw materials? The prevalence of metal deposits does not respond to the market. Increasing prices of lithium will make more people search for lithium deposits, but there's a finite number of said deposits.
And again, the projected increases in in battery production due to increased demand bring down the time to create enough capacity from a matter of centuries to a matter of decades. For batteries that last a few years if cycled daily.
> It also seems reasonable to expect at least one significant breakthrough in battery technology over the next 10-30 years, given how important a problem it is, and how many promising approaches there are already.
So our approach is to keep our fingers crossed and hope for a technological breakthrough. If that's the case we might as well just hope for fusion to work.
But most of us would prefer a solution that we know works rather than bet on the possibility of breakthrough. And right now the only two known means of generating most of a country's power from a carbon free energy source is through hydroelectricity and nuclear power.
I didn't miss that. Why do you think global manufacturing capacity will stop when it reaches what the US needs, and not expand to satisfy the global market? You think the manufactures are going to leave sales and profits on the table for no good reason?
The growth in production is being controlled by the growth in the market. New factories can be added at very high rate if needed. You are treating the manufacturing capacity as some exogenous constraint rather than something that can be changed along with everything else.
To respond to your response: a universal aspect of mineral depletion arguments is that estimates are too low. Demand create supply as people are encouraged to go look for more, and to develop new ways to extract materials.
Consider that natural gas used to be though of as rare and limited, so much so that its use for power production was outlawed in the US!
> Consider that natural gas used to be though of as rare and limited, so much so that its use for power production was outlawed in the US!
Where are you getting this information? Natural gas has been widely extracted for much of the last century [1], and made up substantial portion of electricity generation as early as the 1960s and 1970s [2]. Where did you read that its use for power production was banned?
It became preferable in late 20th and early 21st century for power generation because of stricter emissions standards. Burning methane is cleaner than burning coal, and technology developed to the point that building gas infrastructure was not cost prohibitive.
Natural gas is not an example of a previously rare natural resource suddenly becoming common. And even if it were, there's no guarantee that lithium is going to follow the same fate. Simply assuming that there are always more mineral reserves than is estimated is an easy way to end up with a shortage.
> The prevalence of metal deposits does not respond to the market. Increasing prices of lithium will make more people search for lithium deposits, but there's a finite number of said deposits.
There are battery technologies based off of metals other than lithium. For example, the key downside of sodium batteries seems to be weight/volume, which is less of an issue for grid storage. And there's a lot of easily accessible sodium.
It also seems reasonable to expect at least one significant breakthrough in battery technology over the next 10-30 years, given how important a problem it is, and how many promising approaches there are already.
Finally, there is a lot we can do to reduce storage requirements by strategically spreading load. If we get enough generation capacity and are storage constrained, then electricity could become significantly during generation hours, which would cause people to do things like run their washing machines during the day.
> And while battery production increases, so too does electricity demand.
This is probably true on a worldwide basis. But here in the UK, electrical demand has actually been falling due to more efficient appliances.
