Gathering solar power isn't a problem, but storing it is. Lithium-ion batteries can be cheap now, but I am afraid that we just have not enough lithium sources to build as many batteries as we need.
Also it's unclear for me how to deal with winter. Storing energy gathered in summer for consuming it during winter isn't viable, sine it requires too much storage capacity. The only way left is to have enough solar cells to produce enough energy in winter, but it may be too costly, since typical winter power output is several times less than during summer.
Please don't project lithium shortages as a compelling story. Firstly, unmined resources are large. Secondly battery technology is changing. Thirdly, you need to cite sources if you want to assert we can't make enough.
You ignore pumped hydro as well. Battery stacks are not the only storage.
I'm not a power engineer or any kind of engineer but I think you are repeating fright memes not actual information. I read widely and nothing I read suggests we face any lack of capacity to install battery storage, or pumped hydro.
I'm fascinated with seasonal heat storage using large underground water tanks. Apparently one drains the heat in winter, and dumps heat during the summer?
Mining at scale is a very dirty business, we're just displacing the problem, the root cause is our unlimited quest for "more", electric or fossil it doesn't end well
Because we have relatively cheap lithium batteries mostly because we exploit third-world countries (often including child-labor) and conveniently ignore that part.
Had lithium to be extracted paying regular wages i doubt it would be as cheap as it is today.
> Gathering solar power isn't a problem, but storing it is
I would agree that storage should not be ignored when we talk about the cost but even without storage solar is not useless. Solar + peaking gas power plant is better then gas alone 24x7.
Many sunny countries still burn coal and gas in the middle of the day when solar can provide 100% of energy demand (e. g. in Algeria and many other African countries share of solar is <1%). Dropping cost of PV may help to change this.
Producing some sort of fuel using excess electricity to burn it later is a possible approach. But conversion has losses and storing fuel and maintaining facilities for burning it (basically gas power plants) adds more costs to initially cheap solar energy.
solar is bieng deployed very quickly in many parts of the world, and at wildly different scales.
Sodium batteries and high density capacitors and a long list of other chemical,heat and mechanical, energy storage and conversion technologies are maturing quickly.
Anybody or any country that is lagging will get out competed in a world where fossil fuels costs can only rise. Hydrogen is complicated by it's physical properties, of bieng so tiny and light, that containing it during storage and transfer is still very difficult and expensive.
Liquid solid, and gasious, Hydrocarbon fuels are tied to large ,complicated and expensive industrial operations, with feed stocks that require huge field operations, that NOBODY wants.
Solar just sits there, a "solar spill" is just another sunny day.Realy realy hard to compete.
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Also it's unclear for me how to deal with winter. Storing energy gathered in summer for consuming it during winter isn't viable, sine it requires too much storage capacity. The only way left is to have enough solar cells to produce enough energy in winter, but it may be too costly, since typical winter power output is several times less than during summer.
You ignore pumped hydro as well. Battery stacks are not the only storage.
I'm not a power engineer or any kind of engineer but I think you are repeating fright memes not actual information. I read widely and nothing I read suggests we face any lack of capacity to install battery storage, or pumped hydro.
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You might like: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45332157
$8 million AU for a small town pumped hydro 'battery' for smoothing out edge of electrical grid brownouts.
It's operational now, the Western Power web pages haven't fully caught up with the present.
Has it been proven at the scale and reliability needed to balance a fully solar-dominated grid year-round?
Mining at scale is a very dirty business, we're just displacing the problem, the root cause is our unlimited quest for "more", electric or fossil it doesn't end well
But where are those resources?
Because we have relatively cheap lithium batteries mostly because we exploit third-world countries (often including child-labor) and conveniently ignore that part.
Had lithium to be extracted paying regular wages i doubt it would be as cheap as it is today.
I would agree that storage should not be ignored when we talk about the cost but even without storage solar is not useless. Solar + peaking gas power plant is better then gas alone 24x7.
Many sunny countries still burn coal and gas in the middle of the day when solar can provide 100% of energy demand (e. g. in Algeria and many other African countries share of solar is <1%). Dropping cost of PV may help to change this.
And what unit of power would that be? Why be so vague?