None of these options are “that hard”, but until some storage is built on the multi-gigawatt scale, any conjecture on real build cost is a waste of time.
What about decentralized storages, e.g. a battery in your home in conjunction with solar power, or using your car battery? A lot of the arguments against renewable energy comes from demanding the electricity grid to follow the same principals as it did under fossil fuels. But a fully renewable grid can be governed by different principles.
For home use, sure that distributed model may work. For industrial use, it won’t. The power demands are too high. Especially if you want to cut out the emissions from things like steel production.
Steel production is an example of an industry that has many activities being best suited for a base load. Many industries and also some activities in steel production would be suitable for load balancing approaches.
We currently have a demand driven grid. We should shift the paradigm to a supply driven grid. This of course runs into problems with capitalism, as a main profit driver is the externalization of the costs for damages. If we adequately price the damages into the energy provided, it will drive industries to take a flexible production approach.
I’d reserve judgement on that until they start building grid level battery storage on a scale an order of magnitude bigger than current setups.
I won’t, because nuclear already proved it can’t do it, so we look elsewhere.
Flow batteries are not that hard to ramp up.
None of these options are “that hard”, but until some storage is built on the multi-gigawatt scale, any conjecture on real build cost is a waste of time.
Why do we need gigawatt grid level storages?
What about decentralized storages, e.g. a battery in your home in conjunction with solar power, or using your car battery? A lot of the arguments against renewable energy comes from demanding the electricity grid to follow the same principals as it did under fossil fuels. But a fully renewable grid can be governed by different principles.
For home use, sure that distributed model may work. For industrial use, it won’t. The power demands are too high. Especially if you want to cut out the emissions from things like steel production.
Steel production is an example of an industry that has many activities being best suited for a base load. Many industries and also some activities in steel production would be suitable for load balancing approaches.
We currently have a demand driven grid. We should shift the paradigm to a supply driven grid. This of course runs into problems with capitalism, as a main profit driver is the externalization of the costs for damages. If we adequately price the damages into the energy provided, it will drive industries to take a flexible production approach.