No, the storage part is not there. Hydroelectric storage is expensive, takes a long time to build, and is geographically dependent to boot. Only ~5 minutes of global electricity storage can be provided with batteries using all known lithium deposits. Only 19 minutes worth of storage is available with all the lithium we can mine with today's equipment [1].
This is why plans for a solar and wind grid assume that some silver bullet is going to provide dirt-cheap and nigh-infinitely scalable storage.
These are not particularly relevant or helpful comparisons for knowing whether lithium ion is ready to deploy now (it is), or whether storage will be achievable with lithium ion and other chemistries (it will).
This is only looking at currently known reserves, a number which has doubled in only a few years. It also compares it to total energy consumption, a meaningless comparison for the coming decades.
Further, the same industrial capacity for lithium ion batteries also works for sodium chemistries. We have only focused on lithium because the primary applications are in mobile things at the moment: cars and mobile devices, where the weight advantage of lithium is important.
For grid storage, weight and specific energy are not important, and sodium chemistries will be ideal. There are also entire classes of flow chemistries that are in their infancy.
But what is mature and cost effective is lithium ion storage. The only place where we have open data about the feelings of investors, the PJM and ERCOT interconnection queues, storage is being deployed in GW comparable to new natural gas GW. This number alone, the GW and not the GWh, tells us that investors think this new tech is ready and deplorable. And it is falling in cost exponentially. Other battery tech is following and dropping in cost too, but lithium ion is benefitting from having existing markets that can fund massive learning.
> This is only looking at currently known reserves, a number which has doubled in only a few years.
False. It is estimating at the total amount of accessible lithium, not just the known reserves.
> For grid storage, weight and specific energy are not important, and sodium chemistries will be ideal. There are also entire classes of flow chemistries that are in their infancy.
Feel free to cite this as an option once sodium batteries actually become available at scale. Until then this amounts to, "hope some future solution solves storage."
> But what is mature and cost effective is lithium ion storage. The only place where we have open data about the feelings of investors, the PJM and ERCOT interconnection queues, storage is being deployed in GW comparable to new natural gas GW.
This is not even remotely true. We don't even have 1 GWh of battery storage [1]. Sure, we're not deploying "new" natural gas because energy demand is decreasing and we already have existing natural gas plants. But the point is that
> And it is falling in cost exponentially. Other battery tech is following and dropping in cost too, but lithium ion is benefitting from having existing markets that can fund massive learning.
Cost is a function of supply and demand. If you actually try to use lithium ion batteries for grid storage, this will create massive demand and thus increase cost. Again, there is insufficient accessible lithium to provide even half an hour of energy storage.
The GitHub estimate is only using known resources and reserves, a number which goes up every year as we discover more. It is not an estimate of total accessible lithium. Lithium resources, the type where we get most of our lithium, increased from 40M tons to 80M tons from 2016 to 2020 estimates, and will continue to increase:
And even if your number were right, it doesn't address the core point that battery storage deployment is growing at an absolutely incredible pace. In cost-competitive grids, it's replacing natural gas:
This is just bad economics. These all affect each other. As production costs fall for lithium ion batteries, demand is growing, as shown by that RMI document. The cost of batteries is not falling because the demand is falling, the cost of lithium ion battery is primarily determined by manufacturing costs at the moment. The input costs of lithium is not going up because there's not enough lithium. And if supply of lithium does get constrained in the future, then there are alternative chemistries that are not supply limited.
> The GitHub estimate is only using known resources and reserves, a number which goes up every year as we discover more. It is not an estimate of total accessible lithium.
Yes, it is. 5 minutes is the amount provided by known reserves. 19 minutes is what can be provided with all accessible lithium. This is known reserves, plus the amount we expect to find later.
> I don't know where that number comes from on that page, but it's wrong. More than 2GWh were connected to the US grid in Q4 2020 alone:
Which amounts to a whopping... 14 seconds worth of energy storage.
> And even if your number were right, it doesn't address the core point that battery storage deployment is growing at an absolutely incredible pace. In cost-competitive grids, it's replacing natural gas:
17 GW of natural gas was constructed in Texas alone. In fact, not even all of Texas, just the part serviced by ERCOT. Your claim "storage is being deployed in GW comparable to new natural gas GW" is not even remotely true, and your own sources prove it.
> This is just bad economics. These all affect each other. As production costs fall for lithium ion batteries, demand is growing, as shown by that RMI document. The cost of batteries is not falling because the demand is falling, the cost of lithium ion battery is primarily determined by manufacturing costs at the moment. The input costs of lithium is not going up because there's not enough lithium. And if supply of lithium does get constrained in the future, then there are alternative chemistries that are not supply limited.
The assumption that the price of lithium won't go up if we try to use it for grid storage is bad economics. Let me put the staggering mismatch between battery supply and storage demand in perspective:
* The US alone uses 500 GWh of electricity each hour. The world uses 2.5 TWh of electricity every hour.
* The entire world produces ~300 GWh of lithium ion batteries annually [1].
If we actually tried to provision one hour's worth of electricity storage the price of batteries would skyrocket, because there isn't enough supply to meet demand. We could provision one hour's worth of storage even if we bought every single lithium ion battery produced anywhere in the world for a whole year.
And this issue is going to become even worse as we switch from fossil fuels to electricity for heating, transportation, industrial chemical production, and so forth.
