I wasn’t aware just how good the news is on the green energy front until reading this. We still have a tough road in the short/medium term, but we are more or less irreversibly headed in the right direction.
I wasn’t aware just how good the news is on the green energy front until reading this. We still have a tough road in the short/medium term, but we are more or less irreversibly headed in the right direction.
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.
Yes, we need more storage and generation. The author didn’t say we’re all good and nothing more needs to be done. What’s noteworthy is that renewable energy is cheaper than CO2 emitting, and battery storage is cheaper than peaker plants. (And grid battery can come from things like salt, sand, brick along with better known components like hydro storage, doesn’t have to be rare earth elements)
It’s ok to acknowledge when good things happen while also recognizing bad things.
Climate doomerism is the new climate change denial.
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.