We certainly can use solar, wind & batteries to eliminate fossil fuels from our electricity system. Estimates are that we'd need about 300TWh of batteries, which is on the edge of feasible. Pumped storage would be a lot cheaper, though.
Its not like you can easily sign a PO for a pumped storage site either. Large scale civil engineering is still difficult in most places. And surely it requires lots of survey and design work.
With batteries you can design the site, get consents and order battery units off the peg in under a year.
At current battery prices of $132/kwh and oil at $88/barrel, 300 TWh of batteries per decade is actually 40% more expensive than 90 million barrels of oil per day.
Damn, we are that close. We are using expensive, high-density batteries meant for electronics and transportation for stationary storage. CATL is already claiming $40-$50/kwh for sodium ion batteries that begin production next year. In five years there will be even more grid-targeting battery solutions on the market at low price points.
From a practical business perspective, the falling prices of batteries may not be ideal from an investor's perspective. If I buy $100M of batteries and the price drops 50% in five years, I just "lost" 50 million dollars. You'd have to be at a point where the proceeds to storage exceed the depreciation of the product in order to pencil out, I think. So a lot of storage that could be built probably won't be built until the technology war shakes out.
>CATL is already claiming $40-$50/kwh for sodium ion batteries that begin production next year.
Tried to look this up, but didn't find anything. Where's that?
To be fair they stated it in the most roundabout way (40%-50% cheaper than LFP batteries) and with no time horizon. I think I got that from reports on their recent shareholder meeting but I will have to look it up better.
They're currently rated for 20 years of usable life, so you'd replace 5% of them a year. They're supposedly 95%+ recyclable, it's just not currently economically viable to do so since only cobalt and nickel are cheaper to reuse than to newly mine.
A project I had a colleague working on where the batteries are critical to preventing blackouts since they will result in mothballing of other infrastructure indicated the utility was budgeting for a 5 year lifespan on the batteries.
It's what Tesla puts on their front page marketing[1].
But if you want more detailed breakout, there's this[2] report that you can dig through which states:
> A range of cycle estimates was provided throughout the literature for lithium-ion of up to nearly 6,000 cycles with lower DOD (DiOrio et al., 2015; Greenspon, 2017). The analysis conducted here estimates that lithium-ion LFP can typically provide 2,000 cycles at 80% DOD, while NMC systems provide 1,200 cycles for the same DOD, due to positive electrode dissolution and associated increased capacity loss at the negative electrode. In the next phase, more detailed cycle life data for LFP and NMC chemistries will be obtained. For example, based on 70% capacity at end of life, lithium-ion batteries have demonstrated a cycle life of approximately 8,000 cycles at 80% DOD (R. B. Wright & Motloch, 2001). The calendar life of lithium-ion batteries ranges with some stating > 5 years or as high as 20 years (R. B. Wright & Motloch, 2001) and others in the range of 5-15 years (Dubarry, Qin, & Brooker, 2018). This report estimates a 10-year calendar life at 80% DOD, also assuming 5% of that time will also be allocated to downtime. A cycle life of 2,000 cycles for LFP and 1,200 for NMC is assumed with a 5% increase in total cycles each by 2030.
So with the right chemistry, assuming one cycle a day, assuming 70% depth of discharge is acceptable, 8000 cycles is 21.9 years.
