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.
https://polarnightenergy.com/news/worlds-largest-sand-batter...
In simple terms there's better efficiency and ease of use from having a higher delta (temperature difference) and dirt / sand / salts heated to 600C are significantly hotter than water at 100C.
Once water turns to steam drama and expenses climb.
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.
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
Has it been proven at the scale and reliability needed to balance a fully solar-dominated grid year-round?
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-12-01/australian-first-mini...
Very few places are flat without hills ( Much of Mali is really flat, for example ).
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.
There's a service for that, sold to S&P a decade or so back now:
https://www.spglobal.com/market-intelligence/en/industries/m...
> we have relatively cheap lithium batteries mostly because we exploit third-world countries (often including child-labor)
Citation needed, there's no child labour at Greenbushes and other large global production sites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_mining_in_Australia
Children are less effective at mining than massive excavators and 100 tonne HaulPaks.
> Had lithium to be extracted paying regular wages i doubt it would be as cheap as it is today.
Pay and conditions at largest hard rock lithium mine globally: https://calculate.fairwork.gov.au/payguides/fairwork/ma00001... https://www.fairwork.gov.au/employment-conditions/awards/awa...
Basic weekly pay rates ~ $1,000 (AU) .. plus public holiday and Sunday loading, increases for specialized skills, Night shift rates, trade skills, more paid vacation time than in the US, long service leave, etc.
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Currently a good many lithium mines are shuttered, closed down until the market demand rises, after many of them were opened in anticipation of much greater demand.
Moreover, lithium batteries are not essential to the problem of large scale grid storage; they are energy per kilogram of weight efficient and ideal for cars and battery power on the go; for grid storage there are much heavier batteries that deliver less energy per kilogram .. and that doesn't matter as the battery farms don't move.
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?
chess39•4mo ago
stop50•4mo ago