this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2025
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I guess the biggest bottleneck for renewables is energy storage.
That's the common thought, but it rests on the assumption that demand cannot be manipulated.
Legacy generation incentivized overnight consumption, when the grid had excess production capacity it needed to unload. With solar, we need to reverse those incentives. If it is harder to produce power overnight, we can drive large industry (like steel mills and aluminum smelters) to switch from overnight operations to daytime consumption.
Overnight storage is something we do need, but it is not efficient, and the need for it should be avoided wherever possible.
Parking garages are usually full during the day, when solar is at its highest generation. In the near future, as EV adoption rises, parking garages need charging stations at every space, sucking up every "excess" watt on the grid.
Pretty much. Once we got that covered there is no excuse anymore.
It's basically solved. Sodium batteries are cheaper and much more durable than lithium batteries, and are currently being commercialized. Their only downside is that they are heavier, but that does not matter for grid-scale storage.
I remember reading about those. Sodium batteries are revolutionary. They don't need a rare earth mineral... sodium is friggen everywhere.
Being cheaper than Lithium is great, but are they cheaper than nuclear?
The manpower of maintaining all these batteries seems like it would also be a lot, how would you do it for an entire grid, or would you need to have each individual placing a battery on their property to deal with brownouts?
That's kind of irrelevant.
Nuclear handles the base power generation. Grid storage is meant to handle peaks. It needs to be cheaper than coal, which is also used for peaks.
Anyway, grid storage is already about 200$ per installed kw with lithium. If sodium gets us to 100$, a 1GW installation comparable to a nuclear plant would cost 100 million. That's like 150 to 300x cheaper than a nuclear plant. And a plant takes years to build, decades even. A storage facility takes days or weeks.
Of course that does not count energy generation, but grid scale storage basically stores free excess energy from nuclear and renewables. So they actually improve the cost efficiency of nuclear and renewables, they don't compete with them.
Problem with coal or nuklear is it isn't cheap. In Germany it survies only on subsidies. And Nuclear was abolished in Germany, a bit to early. I said we needed it 10 years longer and we could have shutdown our coal.
The problem I see with wind and solar is you need backup power, to handle the sinusoidal nature of production. So you need to duplicate your power production, and that costs a lot.