this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2024
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The memes of the climate
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None of these options are "that hard", but until some storage is built on the multi-gigawatt scale, any conjecture on real build cost is a waste of time.
Think in terms of probability, not absolute. I mentioned flow batteries because I think it's the most promising and developed, but there are several others. If one doesn't work, ten others are being pursued in parallel. Only one needs to work
In a five year time frame, we'll probably have at least one. More likely three or four.
Nuclear, in contrast, has trouble pursuing multiple possibilities at once. It's too expensive. A decade ago, it was the AP1000 design, which was supposed to avoid the purpose-built engineering that bogged down deployments in the past. That was a failure so hard that Westinghouse nearly collapsed permanently. Now it's SMRs, and given the collapse of the project in Utah, it's not looking good.
I'm more interested in sodium ion being produced that while having less density will charge and discharge in a theoretically endless cycle. Flow battery is great, but it needs to be scalable from the consumer all the way up to grid storage.
There are already large flow battery installations on the grid.
https://newatlas.com/energy/worlds-largest-flow-battery-grid-china/#:~:text=The%20Chinese%20city%20of%20Dalian,to%20200%2C000%20residents%20each%20day.
My point was that something that big is unaffordable, and it needs to be scalable.
Guess what else is unaffordable? Nuclear.
Yes, but I was talking about for home installations. Then economies of scale could make it affordable and scalable for everyone
Why do we need gigawatt grid level storages?
What about decentralized storages, e.g. a battery in your home in conjunction with solar power, or using your car battery? A lot of the arguments against renewable energy comes from demanding the electricity grid to follow the same principals as it did under fossil fuels. But a fully renewable grid can be governed by different principles.
For home use, sure that distributed model may work. For industrial use, it won't. The power demands are too high. Especially if you want to cut out the emissions from things like steel production.
Steel production is an example of an industry that has many activities being best suited for a base load. Many industries and also some activities in steel production would be suitable for load balancing approaches.
We currently have a demand driven grid. We should shift the paradigm to a supply driven grid. This of course runs into problems with capitalism, as a main profit driver is the externalization of the costs for damages. If we adequately price the damages into the energy provided, it will drive industries to take a flexible production approach.
To continue with the heavy industry examples, many run 24/7, not because of direct profit motives, but because of the massive cost associated with letting the process go cold. I've done work at a glass recycling plant where the said point blank: if the furnace ever goes cold, they will just close the plant entirely, since it would cost too much to clean it out and get it going again. Not all processed lend themselves to being turned on and off again constantly.