Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030

I think the future will be robust national/international grids, with a mixture of storage options (batteries/pumped hydro) to smooth out the intermittent nature of wind and solar.

Cynics always talk about the amount of energy storage required for solar as if you need to store 24 hours of energy for solar/wind to be viable.

I'd like to see numbers on having 1 hour of storage for peak demand, a robust national grid, and appropriately provisioned and placed solar and wind, taking the duck curve into consideration.

Even achieving just one hour of storage globally amounts to 2.5 TWh of storage. By comparison the entire world produces ~300 GWh worth of lithium ion battery annually. That leaves geographically limited options like pumped hydroelectricity, and solutions not yet deployed at any significant scale like hydrogen fuel cells, synthetic methane, thermal batteries, flywheels, etc.

Realistically we should saturate daytime energy demand with solar, and if there aren't any scalable storage options by then switch gears and proceed with hydroelectric where it's viable and nuclear where it's not.

>By comparison the entire world produces ~300 GWh worth of lithium ion battery annually.

And this will increase a hundredfold to make EV production possible.

That means that if 10% of production goes to stationary storage then within 10 years, we'll have 10 full global hours of storage.

If there's serious demand then the supply will scale up to create it.

Also, old EV batteries will provide plenty of extra stationary storage. Not to mention batteries still in EVs, in a pinch.

Realistically we won't throw insane amounts of storage at the problem. We'll make demand more flexible so it does work when electricity is cheap and eases off when it becomes more expensive.

For instance, something like heating: why store the electricity for heating? Wouldn't it make more sense for a house to have some form of heavily-insulated thermal mass that it can massively heat when electricity is dirt cheap, then tap into at midnight without drawing power? Storing heat is cheap, you just need a giant block of concrete with solid insulation. You don't need fancy nanoscale tech like with lithium-ion.

Even something like a kettle: the hot water taps you see at companies that are pre-heated. Have a home-version. Insulate the shit out of that and do 90% of the boiling with peak electricity.

And that's not even touching industrial power usage.

Trying to ape past systems that were based on flat electricity prices just seems like a failure of imagination. Of course it would be expensive, but why the heck would you even want to?