I'm thinking of the solar panels and batteries that would be needed and the environmental costs tied to creating them. They may be better allocated to replacing other sources of energy consumption in the near term.
It indeed doesn't sound too bad this way, as long as we can realistically assume this is running 100% on renewables, ie not at night for solar. What's a bit unclear as of now is how much energy and thus possibly co2 emissions went into constructing this thing (material, transportation, etc.) and how long it will take to offset those. One or two years fine, ten years well, we'd have to see what the actual running costs other than electricity is. Should we throw in storage for our solar generated power so we can run it 24/7, we'd have to consider that too. I don't know what the current environmental footprint for lithium batteries is, but probably not negligible at that scale? I mean, I want to believe, I really worry about this, but this just sounds like feel-good project a bit too much.
I don't see batteries being able to store the amount of power (for a practical battery lifetime to be cost effective) needed to make solar a practical primary electricity source.
Part of my thinking was for fully off-grid homes. Are we approaching a point where they could capture the excess for long-term storage? Batteries are not the answer.
It's definitely going to be interesting to see, considering the replacement cycles of 15-20 for the batteries, and 20-30 for the solar array what the scaling, the costs, and what the net environmental impact is going to be.
Solar doesn't work everywhere, nor wind. What is the environmental impact to create all those batteries? Does that cost include converting heating systems to electric? Would better windows have a better ROI?
I expect batteries could get pretty cheap if made in the volume we'd need to power whole cities through the night. But for now there's not so much reason to build those because the proportion of power that comes from renewables is so low that excess production is rarely a problem. There's not much incentive to store solar power for the nighttime when you can sell all that power during the day and people still have to run fossil fuel and nuclear to make up the difference. I suppose as the proportion of solar goes up, the price of daytime electricity will drop and it'll be more attractive to use batteries.
(Places with significant hydroelectric might not even need much storage if they just run water through the turbines at night, or whenever they have a shortfall. Or even pump water back uphill when there's a surplus.)
For almost anything not mobile, that would definitely be an improvement. They mentioned houses with solar storing excess energy, and there's numerous other possible uses including industrial. Potentially also slow moving autonomous machines including lawnmovers could benefit, as replacement is cheaper.
Also for anything with charge cycles fast enough that cost outweighs other factors.
They will probably have an energy storage facitilty nearby. There’s little benefit to bundling these, and the cost of maintenance is increased. Also, batteries will have shorter timespan than the turbines.
It may begin to make sense when battery prices get so low that installation and setup costs increase - similarly to solar where a large part of price currently is installation and scaffolding, not the panels themselves
Are you including mining costs for the metals to create wind turbines and solar panels? The mining costs to create a battery network large enough to have backup power for billions of households? What about the carbon cost of replacing and recycling the batteries? What about the carbon cost of rebuilding/refurbishing the current electrical networks to allow for this green future? What about creating a supply network for transportation where one basically doesn't exist today?
Hydrocarbons are 12-15x more energy dense than what current batteries are able to store. A $1 spent today on hydrocarbon production results in 500-600% more energy produced than $1 spent on solar/wind energy production. Green is sexy, but the physics and economics don't support a massive shift to green.
Great point, How much battery capacity and energy the utility will require (big expense for project proponent they have to inevitably recover from ratepayers) for solar or wind farms is another Aspect that has to be studied
I think Solar coupled with batteries or hydroelectric storage makes a lot of sense - decentralized, proven tech, relatively easy to repair, much cheaper to build in remote areas instead of long high voltage power lines. I'm just wondering about Lithium supplies if half the world is going battery powered.
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