Understanding Solar Energy

The bit how about incredibly quickly PV has grown is a figurative slap in the face to Vaclav Smil. He had just ten years earlier said PV wasn't going to grow quickly because historically energy replacements took a long time.

https://vaclavsmil.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/scientific...

This retrospective on Smil's predictions four years ago is notable:

https://www.quora.com/Is-Vaclav-Smil-right-in-his-criticisms...

"To get 1 PWh/year of electricity you need to install about 450 GW worth of solar panels. You need dozens of years to acomplish such task. Reality check: 3 years in current speed, in the future probably faster."

Indeed, as the thread top link shows in 2024 the world installed 595 GW of PV.

As John Kenneth Galbraith said, "If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error."

What people tend to forget is, that coal, oil and gas are all restricted by mining or drilling as the old are consumed, and it gets harder to access new oil wells etc. For PV there is no such limit (only copper basically, but this is recyclable and aluminum can do many tasks.) For batteries, there is lithium (lifepo4) and even that is questionable (sodium batteries) and again there is the potential for recycling. Hence, I do not see anything stopping the exponential growth of PV and batteries.

You are right.

But one misconception I often read is that everyone focuses on batteries. It would make more sense in general to talk about energy storage instead of just batteries. Like Kinetic, chemical, thermal and so on.

Batteries cannot be solely responsible for back-up. You need different types of storage: short term, medium term and long term storage.

There are different concepts for each application. Batteries, compressed air storage, pumped storage, kinetic, thermal storage as well as power-to-X systems are able to absorb the increasing summer power and provide the energy again in the medium term or seasonally shifted.

https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000445597

I think this is going to turn out like the exotic panel chemistries: batteries are simple and have powerful continual improvement in performance and price, while the others turn out to be more complicated. In particular solid state wins over mechanical anything almost every time.