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Q: “Are we doomed?” A: “We would be, if not for the amazing developments in renewable energy.”
(powering-the-planet.ghost.io)
this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2024
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Storage is nowhere near enough if we want self sustainable green energy. And author should compare winter moths when it comes to solar panels production - worst case. Yes, there is development and each day a breaking new battery tech is announced but until these get produced for real in mass quantities, they are vaporware. Mind that we need storage for like at least a week, better a month of energy worth. And that's a lot of batteries.
Grid scale storage has come a long way. There are saltwater batteries and flow batteries in use now, those technologies are here, they're just still being iterated on and improved. And as the renewables get increasingly affordable, the demand for storage will rise with it. Now we're still mostly deploying expensive lithium batteries, but as more of that gets installed, the demand for cheaper storage will skyrocket. And production generally follows demand.
Do you have any data how much of those batteries are in fact in use? For example, Slovenia needs something north of 1.5 * 24 GWh energy for a day. And we are 2 mills population. Plus during winter you need to charge them. With short days of like 5 hours of less than ideal sun if no clouds or fog ... good luck. Perhaps eventually we'll get there, but it's really far far away.
Well if there's not enough sun, wind could be a better option. I don't know much about the climate in slovenia, so either could make more sense.
As for these new kinds of batteries, I don't have the hard numbers on hand, but I know the current installed capacity is really small. So as a product, they're still really new.