Industrial-scale batteries are far from a solved problem, and require a lot of excess energy production to fill them that doesn't already get depleted at night.
A far more realistic solution is to be able to flex with things like gas plants that don't need to be always running and can function on demand.
We are going to have massive amounts of excess energy production as renewables gain higher penetration on grids. The rea problem will be transmission capacity, or alternatively phrased, making sure storage is close enough to the generation.
California usually curtails large amounts of renewable energy in the spring, but even their smallish installs of 1-2GWh of storage recently has massively reduced that wasted energy. And they aren't even at super high penetration yet for renewables.
We will probably keep lots of backup gas turbines for a decade or two, but by the time significant nuclear could come online, other tech will probably have solved it.
And unfortunately in the US, our nuclear fleet is really close to retirement, and we are going to be losing a ton of nuclear generation capacity soon, with no way to rebuild it. We need other solutions fast.
Sodium Ion is supposed to commercialize this year if you can believe CATL, with high temp range, good safety, good charge cycles, all supposed to be better than LFP at ?half? the cost (we'll see when it hits the market).
I think sodium ion batteries will be the game changer in utility storage, like good-density (200 Wh/kg) LFP will for mass EV/PHEV electrification (sodium ion will help there too in hybrid batteries).
If we get sodium ion grid storage, another 50% drop in wind/solar utility LCOE, and residential solar gets on par with natural gas LCOE, and good-density LFP batteries deliver 100 mile PHEVs and 250-300 mile EVs in 10 years, then we might actually have a cslim hance of handling global warming
It isn't a solved problem, but there is already industrial scale deployments happening, and what that means is there is a massive market to chase and the ball is rolling fast. It's not like fusion where we are waiting on tech hurdles before the economics are even tackled.
Gas plants will have to do for flexing, much better than coal. It's not like politically they'll all get shutdown (I mean, they should or get a two year warning, but that won't happen).
I think residential solar should be vastly more subsidized. That way the solar that does get made doesn't have as much transmission losses through the grid, it gets used directly, but maybe I'm wrong about that.
I would also like a good synthetic fuels strategy that isn't a creep marketing conspiracy to keep fossil fuels business running (hydrogen "green/blue/gray" color BS falls into this category), that could handle aviation, long haul shipping, and home heating at at least carbon neutrality.
> the solar that does get made doesn't have as much transmission losses through the grid
Transmission losses are really not a significant problem. Average US transmission losses are less than 6%, Norway just over, and UK about 8%.
Large solar farms are much cheaper to build per kW and are still quite local to where the energy is consumed so the losses for them will be much less than the current national averages
Mind you I'm not arguing against subsidizing rooftop solar, just that transmission losses are not a major factor in the argument.
> I think residential solar should be vastly more subsidized.
I don't. The grid has to be sized for the worst case load, not for the average load, so reducing the latter with residential solar doesn't reduce the cost of having the grid around. And utility-scale solar is much cheaper per unit of power than residential solar.
Isn't pumped hydro-electricity a solved problem for off-peak energy storage? Granted, only for countries with hills/mountains (not the Netherlands etc.)
You still require a place to pump that water into. Forming a lake isn't exactly a very ecology-friendly thing, and as much as you'd love to drown <city>, requires absurd amounts of work.
