US grid adds batteries at 10x the rate of natural gas in first half of 2024

Iron-air rust batteries are also pretty intersting. Just iron, air and water to store power by exploiting how rust forms.

They are a lot more expensive than expected at the moment, once they start selling at the 30$/KWh they were proposed at they will be fantastic but if they stay at their current price LFP is going to be a lot cheaper.

There’s a huge difference between day/night storage which is sufficient for most locations in the world that are somewhat closer to the equator, and seasonal storage. We have no good solution for seasonal storage at the moment.

What is your understanding based on?

Regarding production batteries might be more expensive, but they can be charged some thousand times without any additional cost

Yah, downvote the guy for asking for sources for a baseless claim. I have heavy doubts that battery storage is anywhere near as cost effective as NG turbines. I'd love to see some real numbers on that.

And I say this as someone with a house running on batteries and solar exclusively.

I guess it kinda depends on how and where you source your batteries.

There was something in Australia I think that was using old EV batteries for grid scale power storage. As EV adoption goes up eventually old batteries will get pulled from vehicles, and reusing them for grid or even home scale power storage is a great use.

In the US, the major source of natgas is now fracking.

And uh, fracking is about the most gross extraction method for anything you can dig out of the ground.

You make the batteries once, and the pollution due to production is spread over the 10-15 year lifetime of the battery. During that time gigawatt hours of clean power sloshes in and out of them. This in contrast to having to produce enough gas to make all of those gigawatt hours once, then throw the gas away as co2 and get more, along with the attendant pollution.

Mostly because natural gas is a one and done thing when it is used. Batteries can be recycled. Production of natural gas is largely done through racking which destroys the groundwater. While batteries often require mining (excluding mechanical ones), they often can be broken down and reused in new batteries. And of course there is the greenhouse gas emissions from methane that are horrible. Methane is extremely leaky. Methane usage emits about as much greenhouse gas emissions as coal does.

Do you want the math or would you prefer less reading and more pictures?

Pumped hydro is both very geologically limited and environmentally detrimental. That technology alone will not substantially reduce the need for other power storage technologies/ peaker plants.

Lithium Ion is more advanced battery technology because it's got high energy density which means it's used in consumer electronics. Lower energy density technologies exist with better properties for storing at grid scale. They're heavier and bigger than lithium ion batteries, but can store energy a lot longer and use much more available materials. One example is Form Energy's Iron/Air battery, which uses rusting iron to store electricity for hundreds of hours.

Sodium batteries are already being produced (only in one factory in the US and one in China so far but its a start to commercial production), there's enough of that stuff to build batteries for the entire planet a thousand times over.

there's not enough lithium

I am hopeful that developments in sodium ion battery tech will yield different strategies. The weight and energy densities vs cost and abundance mean that it makes more sense (at this time at least) to reserve lithium ion battery tech for more mobile use cases like handheld devices and EVs, but use sodium ion battery tech for things like grid storage or home energy management solutions. I dream of a day in the next decade or two in which virtually nobody bothers to have a generator for emergency home power and instead opts for a UPS with inverters and chargers hooked up to a home battery, allowing not only emergency power, but a "smart" system to power the home via battery during high grid demand and charge during low demand, normalizing grid supply curves and making power bills cheaper for all. The path to this starts with big scale early adopters like hotels and apartment buildings, which could easily supplement energy needs through solar panels on their large roofs at the same time.

For all the enshittification we're seeing across most industries, I am cautiously optimistic that we might be living at the edge of an energy revolution. We may see fucking huge fundamental changes to our energy infrastructure within our lifetimes, and that's one of the few things I'm excited about for the near future. It's unfortunate that it's taking a crisis to force these changes, but it would be a great pivot nonetheless.

Oh there's enough lithium. Not enough lithium production, surely, but there's enough lithium in the ocean and in brines easily.

there’s not enough lithium on this planet to store enough energy for like half of europe nevermind entire world

This is a good use case for sodium batteries. They're less energy-dense so not great for vehicles, but for a stationary application like this they're perfect.

There are plenty of alternatives for lithium batteries, chiefly sodium and a redox flow. Heating/cooling is good as well to store, but not every structure is energy efficient enough that it would make much sense. Good thing to work towards, but grid batteries would probably be faster and easier to implement. I have reservations towards pumped hydropower, in part due to watching how hard it is to decommission a lot of hydroelectric dams these days in US as well as the cost to create the areas to hold the water (a lot of the areas that are geographically advantageous for pumped hydropower tend to be nature reserves or national parks, soo...).

You know what pumped storage hydro is? A battery. Unfortunately that is not an option everywhere and takes up a massive amount of space. The space portion is not a huge issue for grid energy storage for the most part but it can definitely limit where you can do it and its capacity.

As for the amount of lithium available, there is absolutely more than enough considering it is one of the most abundant materials on our planet. Not that we need to use lithium for grid energy storage. Lithium is very high density energy storage which you are correct that is not a high priority for grid energy storage.

Basically there is no one solution for grid energy storage. There are mechanical batteries, medium density chemical batteries, and even "depleted" EV batteries. We just need to apply what is right for each particular scenario.

I'm not disagreeing with you overall. But I figured more info and context is helpful.

Of course, Li-ion batteries will never cover large-scale power demand. Not primarily because of lack of lithium, but because it's a technology that scales far too poorly into the MWh/TWh scale, and has a far too short lifetime.

The battery tech we need for truly large scale storage is different from what we need for small, portable storage. Stuff like redox-flow batteries are looking promising.

There's also hydrogen, with different storage methods being actively researched- from direct storage to using ammonia as a carrier.

The issue with using mechanical storage (like pumped hydropower) is threefold (off the top of my head):

1. It has ridiculously low energy density
2. Even after > 100 years of pumps and turbines, the power loss in a pump/release cycle is very high.
3. It's heavily limited by geography

I'm not saying pumped hydropower isn't part of the solution: I believe the solution is that we need many solutions. I just think it's important to point out that battery tech isn't some monolithic thing, and that there are issues with pumped hydropower (and mechanical storage in general).

I'll be the first to say de-carbonizing a home isn't cheap to do (or the home ownership for that matter). I'm doing what I can by buying and implementing the de-carbonized solutions today to increase market demands driving the technology and solutions lower for everyone else.

Yeah my original comment here was a lot more breathy than it should have been. I'm not critical of the article it's definitely uplifting and accurate. But I think new battery tech on the grid would see usefulness even if renewables weren't inconsistent, but that's a whole different topic I suppose.

I wish you were wrong. But...

A Climate Town video convinced me natural gas actually manages to be worse.

Natural gas is methane, and it's extremely hard to handle that without having any leaks, ever. And since methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas, it doesn't take that much leaked gas to cross the line into "worse than coal".

And there are lots of leaks.

Actually it is true:

Source