> It's a trivial amount of storage for a trivial amount of money. Do the math, don't hand wave.
Sure thing! Right now we have an annual battery production rate of 500 GWh globally [1]. If we're going to use global battery production figures, we need to use global electricity consumption, which is about 70 TWh per day [2]. How much storage we'll need varies, depending on the mix of solar and wind. Estimates I can find say 12 hours on the low end, 3 weeks on the high end [3].
So even with the optimistic estimates of 12 hours, that means we'd need 35,000 GWh of storage. This is 70 years of global production at our current rate, for the optimistic storage estimates. And of course we can't dedicate all battery production to grid storage - we need them for electric vehicles, and electrical devices
Production of batteries may grow in the future, but then again so will electricity demand as countries develop and transportation becomes more electrified. Furthermore, we're not counting the fact that batteries have limited lifetimes. It depends on depth of discharge, but we're usually looking at 1,500 to 3,000 cycles before they're substantially degraded.
As your can see, the scale of battery production and the scale of energy storage required to make intermittent sources variable are totally mismatched. The reality is there is no amount of money that will provision the battery storage required, because if countries across the world start trying to buy terawatt hours of batteries when only 500GWh of batteries are produced then the cost of batteries will skyrocket. Cathode material already
> The Eland project provides 24 hour power with only 4hr of storage. That's the demand curve in action.
The "demand curve" means Eland doesn't provide 24 hours of power at its rated output. It provides a fraction of its rated power at night and tells customers not to use as much electricity. This may work for some consumers, but not others. The pumps powering your sewage system can't demand shift if you want to flush your toilet at night. The reality is that peak energy demand happens at night [4], when storage isn't producing electricity. Eland can do this demand shift because other producers are picking up the slack.
When you read about storage projects you need to be on the lookout for weasel-words like this. Demand curve means they produce a fraction of the rated power output during periods of non-production. If I have a plant that produces 1,000 MW during the date and 100=MW at night, that's technically 24 hours of production. But clearly this is not the same thing as a nuclear plant that produces 1n000 MW at all hours.
The US alone has 800GWh of battery plants in the pipeline, to come online before 2026.[1] China has multiple TWh's worth. We can build 35TWh or even 350TWh of batteries a lot faster and than we can build the multiple TW of nuclear plants that would be necessary to decarbonize electricity without storage.
> The reality is that peak energy demand happens at night
Peak net energy demand happens at night. Peak gross demand is during the day.
> Eland can do this demand shift because other producers are picking up the slack.
Eland is producing at a rate identical to the California demand curve, it's in their contract. It's the solar producers who don't have solar along with consumer rooftop solar that's causing the duck curve daytime demand drop.
> If I have a plant that produces 1,000 MW during the date and 100=MW at night, that's technically 24 hours of production. But clearly this is not the same thing as a nuclear plant that produces 1000 MW at all hours.
But the former costs 1/10th of the latter, so you build 10 of them to get 1000MW at night and 10000MW during the day.
The "pipeline" you're referring to is a measure of battery manufacturing capacity. This is not nearly the same thing as actual production figures. Capacity utilization in 2022 was under 35%. In other words, 100 GWh of capacity only translated into 35 GWh of battery production. This is because the majority of cost of lithium ion batteries is in raw materials, namely cathode material [1]. A huge amount of capacity is useless if you don't have the input materials to feed your factories.
You can't store energy in a battery factory, you store energy in batteries. Cite the actual production figures, not the stated capacity figures (spoiler alert: it was just under 500 GWh last year.).
And to reiterate, the vast majority of this production is not going to grid storage, it's going to EVs and electronics. Even if battery production matches the predicted growth, it's still vastly insufficient to provision grid storage without heavily crippling EV rollout.
> Eland is producing at a rate identical to the California demand curve, it's in their contract. It's the solar producers who don't have solar along with consumer rooftop solar that's causing the duck curve daytime demand drop
Demand remains high well into midnight. I'm not sure why you think matching the demand curve is somehow going to mean you're going to get away with less storage. Unless Eland is going to be producing much less than its nameplate capacity at all times of day, 4 hours of storage is nowhere near enough for it to match the demand curve. And remember, solar is also subject to cloud cover. I'm sure Eland has clauses exempting it during periods of cloud coverage otherwise they'd need weeks of storage not hours.
> If I have a plant that produces 1,000 MW during the date and 100=MW at night, that's technically 24 hours of production. But clearly this is not the same thing as a nuclear plant that produces 1000 MW at all hours. But the former costs 1/10th of the latter, so you build 10 of them to get 1000MW at night and 10000MW during the day.
The former doesn't have a price tag, because no amount of money in the world will buy you that much lithium ion batteries. Again, the world uses 70,000 GWh of electricty per day, most of that being consumed when solar is not producing electricity. No amount of money can fulfill that amount of storage.
To me it seems reasonable to assume that not only will battery consumption grow, it will grow exponentially (over the medium term - say the next 10 - 50 years). Rationale:
- There is high demand
- The production process is well established technology that can be easily replicated
- There are no obvious limits to growth in the medium term (In the short-term there are resource constraints as mines are opened).
Your link 3 also contains this line: "The solar heavy network wouldn’t need energy storage with an HVDC network."
IOW, the US could build a 100% solar+wind+hydro grid WITHOUT ANY STORAGE. The wind is always blowing somewhere in the US.
Of course that much HVDC and overbuild would be ridiculously expensive, but some HVDC and some batteries are a lot cheaper than only HVDC or only batteries.
The Eland project provides 24 hour power with only 4hr of storage. That's the demand curve in action.