No, the problem is that the one that wins the competition is still not viable at grid scale. The competition isn't against other storage systems, the competition is against energy systems that don't require storage. Nuclear was build at around $1-2 billion per GW when it was built at scale during the 1960s and 70s. It's hard for any renewable + storage system to compete against that.
I've explained over and over again to you that you're wrong. Studies such as this one (and others) confirm what I say. I have wonder why, in the face of repeated explanation, you are so resistant to understanding.
Because your "explanations" are incorrect. You just assume storage systems will become multiple orders of magnitude cheaper than they are today, and offer no reason to justify this assumption.
In fact, read what TFA actually says about storage;
> Key pillars of this new energy system are solar and wind energy, energy storage, sector coupling, and electrification of all energy and industry sectors implying power-to-X and hydrogen-to-X solutions, complemented by upcoming carbon dioxide removal.
I chuckled when I read "Power-to-X". It's a pretty funny way of saying "we no idea how to deliver storage at this scale".
No, I do not assume storage systems become multiple orders of magnitude cheaper than they are today. Even the storage systems available at today's price points would allow renewables to be leveled at a price that could be afforded. Rather modest reductions in cost would be preferable, of course, and we can expect those to occur.
Power-to-X is using technologies that are mostly off the shelf. The particularly important one that wasn't, low cost electrolyzers, has seen tremendous progress. The Chinese are now selling these for < $300/kW, a fraction of the price assumed in the 2030 assumptions in that modeling site I like to point to.
Except storage systems today don't scale and become more expensive when deployed at anything close to grid scale. Google told me that lithium ion batteries are $130-150 per KWh. But it turns out when you try to buy loads of them they become scarce and the price goes up. New York ended up paying over $500 for it's storage: https://www.utilitydive.com/news/new-york-battery-storage-co...
Keep stanning "Power-to-X" solutions. But until you actually have a solution for X that works at grid scale, there's no real solution. Just empty promises.
You edited your post after I replied:
> Power-to-X is using technologies that are mostly off the shelf. The particularly important one that wasn't, low cost electrolyzers, has seen tremendous progress. The Chinese are now selling these for < $300/kW, a fraction of the price assumed in the 2030 assumptions in that modeling site I like to point to.
Except none of those systems scale. If they did, the article would have actually specified the storage system. But then they'd have to stand up to scrutiny over whether that storage system can actually deliver at the promised scale. Because it can't, they use ambiguous language like "power to X".
You are repeating the same tired bullshit here. When supply is constrained, greatly increased demand can drive up prices. That doesn't mean storage doesn't scale, it just means we haven't built enough factories yet.
I'm sure you can remember many episodes in computing where the price of something (DRAMs, GPUs, whatever) temporarily went up because of supply constraints. It would have been deeply foolish to proclaim this mean price declines were over.
A similar thing happened with PV back around 2009 or so. The long term decline trend appeared to stall, because of poly-Si shortages. Dishonest skeptics claimed PV cost declines were over. What happened then? The prices provided incentive for more manufacturing capacity to be added, and the decline tracked back to the long term downward trend line.
You know what we call it when factories and raw materials can't keep up with the demand and lead to skyrocketing costs? A system that doesn't scale.
DRAM and GPUs aren't bottlenecked by raw materials the way energy storage is. It was a shortage of electrical components, not a shortage of copper. It is a very wrong assumption to think that resource extractions behaves like semiconductor manufacturing.
I will further say that for your argument to be correct, it must be correct not just for Li-ion batteries, but for all possible storage technologies. You have not, and indeed cannot, make that argument with any level of honesty, since you do not know the bounds of such technologies. This does not stop you from making it though, which is very sad.
No, you can't just "scale up" mining by a factor of 1000. And yes, that's the kind of increase we'll need to make storage systems viable. I don't think you fully appreciate just how massive an undertaking it is to provide the storage required to make intermittent sources viable. It's estimated it'll take 3 weeks of storage to make intermittent sources viable: https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-stora...
By comparison, the world uses 60TWh of electricity daily.
There is no realistic plan to build this amount of storage. You have not, and indeed cannot, honestly make the argument that it's within our capacity to build storage at such a scale. Hence why you point to untested storage systems like compressed air or hydrogen electrolysis. We don't know that they will scale, since we have not attempted to build them at scale. You take this absence of evidence as proof that they will scale instead of recognizing it for what it is: and absence of evidence since hardly any of these storage systems have been built. This is your pattern of commenting: you concede that the storage systems that we have built at scale don't work. Then you point to the storage systems that we haven't built at scale and assume they will work at scales dwarfing anything we've built so far.
We do not have the capacity to build storage to make intermittent sources viable. You just assume that every new and untested storage system will be super cheap even when it's built by the terawatt hour. And then you call people dishonest when the point out that you're the one being dishonest about our experience with energy storage.
They said that with only solar, wind, and HVDC but no batteries you could get 80% renewable.
Or, with 12hr of battery but no HDVC you could get 80% renewable.
And, if you used only batteries, you could get the last 20%.
Which, is pretty good? They're not recommending you ignore other technologies, they're just trying to establish rough costs for simplified models.
They seem to think so back in 2018 anyway:
> “The fact that we could get 80 percent of our power from wind and solar alone is really encouraging,” he said. “Five years ago, many people doubted that these resources could account for more than 20 or 30 percent.”
>But beyond the 80 percent mark...Options could include nuclear and hydroelectric power generation, as well as managing demand.”
Here's where it gets cited in the current work (footnote 275):
> Critics of 100% RE systems like to contrast solar and wind with ’firm’ energy sources like nuclear and fossil fuels (often combined with CCS) that bring their own storage. This is the key point made in some already mentioned reactions, such as those by Clack et al. [225], Trainer [226], Heard et al. [227] Jenkins et al. [228], and Caldeira et al. [275], [276]. However, while it is true that keeping a system with variable sources stable is more complex, a range of strategies can be employed that are often ignored or underutilized in critical studies: oversizing solar and wind capacities; strengthening interconnections [68], [82], [132], [143], [277], [278]; demand response [279], [172], e.g. smart electric vehicles charging using delayed charging or delivering energy back to the electricity grid via vehicle-to-grid [181], [280]–[281][282]; storage [40]–[41][42][43], [46], [83], [140], [142], such as stationary batteries; sector coupling [16], [39], [90]–[91][92], [97], [132], [216], e.g. optimizing the interaction between electricity, heat, transport, and industry; power-to-X [39], [106], [134], [176], e.g. producing hydrogen at moments when there is abundant energy; et cetera. Using all these strategies effectively to mitigate variability is where much of the cutting-edge development of 100% RE scenarios takes place.
> With every iteration in the research and with every technological breakthrough in these areas, 100% RE systems become increasingly viable. Even former critics must admit that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels. These critics are still questioning whether 100% RE is the cheapest solution but no longer claim it would be unfeasible or prohibitively expensive.
> Even former critics must admit that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels
E-fuels and "ptx" are ambiguous terms for energy storage. That plan is making the same allusions to storage systems that do not yet exist. What is "X"? Can it actually be built as cheaply as people promise? Until that's answered, this is just wishful thinking.
> Modern 100% RE scenarios often make wide use of power-to-X (PtX) technologies, in particular, power-to-heat [22] and power-to-hydrogen [23]–[24][25][26]. Where direct hydrogen cannot yet be used, such as in the chemical industry or for long-distance marine and aviation transportation, hydrogen can be further converted to synthetic electricity-based fuels (e-fuels) as chemically bound RE and such as e-methane [27], [28], Fischer-Tropsch fuels [29], [30], e-ammonia [31], [32], and e-methanol [33], [34].
This is hydrogen electrolysis and the Sabatier process. There have been attempts to do this, but difficulties continue to prevent it from being deployed at scale. Hydrogen electrolysis is less efficient and maintaining the electeolysis systems expensive.
The Sabatier process (aka power to gas) requires hydrogen as an input so it shares all of the above. It also requires a source of carbon dioxide to fix into hydrocarbons. Usually this is only done opportunistically when industrial processes produce carbon dioxide as a byproduct. The carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is at too low a concentration to be useful. This could be delivered through biofuels but there's not much energy density in them.
If they can actually deliver these systems at viable costs, great. But no one has accomplished this so far.
If you are assuring us storage won't do it, the ambiguity doesn't matter, as it is on your plate to refute every last possibility. So step up and do you job and refute all possible interpretations of those terms. It's your responsibility to do so. You also have to refute all possible combinations of all the elements in the message you are responding to. But I assume you've done that, otherwise your assurance that 100% renewables can't work would be a lie.
No, the burden of proof is one the one saying that X is a viable approach. You're asking people to prove a negative.
Here's a thought: we don't need fission nor renewables nor storage. Fusion will give us unlimited cheap energy! Now you have to refute every possible implementation of fusion energy - even methods we haven't built or tested - otherwise you're lying. Step up and do your job refuting all possible implementations of fusion!
This is the kind of logic you're making with energy storage, and it's faulty logic. If someone wants to claim the viability of fusion, they actually have to deliver a working fusion reactor and at a viable cost. It's not the burden of other people to disprove every possible implementation of fusion.
