Solar/wind + battery storage is cheaper than natural gas and a hell of a lot cleaner. It makes no sense to go for a more expensive, dirtier form of energy.
Solar/wind + battery storage is cheaper than natural gas and a hell of a lot cleaner. It makes no sense to go for a more expensive, dirtier form of energy.
How exactly is the production of batteries cleaner and cheaper than the production of natural gas?
Mostly because natural gas is a one and done thing when it is used. Batteries can be recycled. Production of natural gas is largely done through racking which destroys the groundwater. While batteries often require mining (excluding mechanical ones), they often can be broken down and reused in new batteries. And of course there is the greenhouse gas emissions from methane that are horrible. Methane is extremely leaky. Methane usage emits about as much greenhouse gas emissions as coal does.
I enjoy how much effort it takes to ignore how batteries are produced in order to argue for them in a comparison with natural gas.
I enjoy that you are making a strawman. Nobody ever said batteries have no negatives. You asked how they were leaner than natural gas. I answered. Sorry that the answer hurt your feelings.
How exactly is the production of batteries cleaner and cheaper than the production of natural gas?
On to your bullshit “answer”:
Mostly because natural gas is a one and done thing when it is used.
Has nothing to do with the production.
Batteries can be recycled.
Nothing to do with base production, again.
Production of natural gas is largely done through racking which destroys the groundwater. While batteries often require mining
Finally! Production!
Oh no… So apparently mining doesn’t impact ground water in anyway? What about nearby rivers? Lakes?
(excluding mechanical ones), they often can be broken down and reused in new batteries.
You already said batteries can be recycled. No shit Shirlocke, doesn’t make the mines have less impact.
And of course there is the greenhouse gas emissions from methane that are horrible.
What about all of the GHG to open and maintain a Lithium mine? Transport of raw Lithium to production lines? The refining of Lithium for use in batteries?
Etc. Etc.
Methane is extremely leaky. Methane usage emits about as much greenhouse gas emissions as coal does.
Yup, that is true. Doesn’t mean that batteries are a “green” alternative when they do just as much damage and use a resource that is far more finite.
I enjoy that you are making a strawman. Nobody ever said batteries have no negatives. You asked how they were leaner than natural gas. I answered. Sorry that the answer hurt your feelings.
I do love how people like you always default to “sorry I hurt your feelings” like some knob who thinks I don’t believe in climate change actually has an impact on my mental health and feelings.
Player one syndrome is strong with you young padawan, look into that before it gets terminal.
When you “mine” natural gas and burn it for heat, it’s gone. It disappears (and produces harmful GHG in the process) You have to keep doing this to get more output.
When you mine materials for batteries, you end up with a physical thing that persists, can be used over and over and can be recycled into new batteries at end of life.
This means the amount of mining required for renewables + batteries is proportional to only the addition of new capacity, whereas the amount of “mining” for fossil fuels is proportional to the total gross energy output (including significant heat losses)
We’re mining a lot of battery materials now, but that’s because we’re adding a crapload of capacity.
Health and Environmental Concerns
Despite the positive outlooks on battery recycling, negative effects also have been shown to impact developing nations that recycle batteries, especially those with lead and lithium.
Lead is a highly toxic substance, and processing it can result in pollution and contamination of people, resulting in long-term health problems and even disability.[59][33] According to one ranking, lead-acid battery recycling is, by far, the most deadly industrial process, globally, in terms of Disability-adjusted life years lost—costing between 2,000,000 and 4,800,000 estimated lost years of individual human life.[60]
Since 2015, developing nations like Vietnam have increased their battery processing capacity as global demand for batteries has grown. The process for recycling batteries often leads to toxic metals being introduced into the environment. In many of these nations, there are little protections available for workers working with the batteries.[3] In nations like Indonesia, it was reported that over a span of four years, battery recycler’s blood lead levels almost doubled.[61] Lead exposure to workers can also be transmitted to family members away from work, ultimately leading to lead poisoning. [62]
More studies continue to be conducted to gather an understanding of environmental impacts. Studies show that most lithium-ion batteries contain Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). PFAS accumulates in humans and wildlife, often leading to immune and thyroid disfunctions, liver diseases, and other issues relating to homeostasis inside of the body.[63] Lead contamination of neighborhoods has resulted from the process of recycling lead batteries. In 1992, the EPA reported 29 lead-recycling sites were on the EPA’s Superfund clean-up list, 22 of them on their “National Priority List.”[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_recycling#Lithium_ion_batteries
Do you want the math or would you prefer less reading and more pictures?
Do you want the math or would you prefer less reading and more pictures?
Nothing like an ignoramus to try and make someone else feel stupid for asking a question.
Since you are all knowing, explain to me exactly how deep earth mining is less costly and better for the environment than deep earth drilling.
Or did you think we just magically pull batteries from thin air at 0 cost?
Since you are all knowing, explain to me exactly how deep earth mining is less costly and better for the environment than deep earth drilling.
Easy, just compare the amount of pollution required to make a battery and a solar panel with the amount of pollution required to extract and burn fossil fuels for the equivalent power output over the duration of the renewable’s working lifetime.
Oh, and don’t forget. Fossil fuels are useless without an engine to burn them, so you need to account for those infrastructure costs as well.
Easy, just compare the amount of pollution required to make a battery and a solar panel with the amount of pollution required to extract and burn fossil fuels for the equivalent power output over the duration of the renewable’s working lifetime.
If it is so easy I am waiting.
In the US, the major source of natgas is now fracking.
And uh, fracking is about the most gross extraction method for anything you can dig out of the ground.
Cool story. How do we pull rare earth minerals, needed for batteries, from the ground?
Typically not by injecting toxic carcinogens into the ground to do so, like we do with fracking.
Also I’ve not heard of any strip mining activities that turn a town’s only water supply into something that’s flammable, but I perhaps missed that?
Or the ongoing incidents of child and adult cancer caused by this itty bitty little toxic waste issue.
Typically not by injecting toxic carcinogens into the ground to do so, like we do with fracking.
Also I’ve not heard of any strip mining activities that turn a town’s only water supply into something that’s flammable, but I perhaps missed that?
Or the ongoing incidents of child and adult cancer caused by this itty bitty little toxic waste issue.
No need to flat out lie in order to make a point.
Unless you want to honestly double down on the “I am so ignorant that I honestly believe mines do not contaminate surrounding areas” card you should take off for the day, rest up, and try again tomorrow bud.
there’s not enough lithium on this planet to store enough energy for like half of europe nevermind entire world
you know how to do this the right way? use pumped-storage hydropower. need more? build more, then dump power into heaters (or better yet heat pumps) on demand from grid since fossil fuel heating will be replaced anyway. (we’re nowhere close to this, but it can sink a lot of energy quickly while not using it at some other times)
there’s not enough lithium on this planet to store enough energy for like half of europe nevermind entire world
This is a good use case for sodium batteries. They’re less energy-dense so not great for vehicles, but for a stationary application like this they’re perfect.
yeah this is fine, but these need to run at high temperatures last time i’ve checked. that makes it a bit more complicated to use
Sodiem electric batteries, like the type that CATL developed? Or do you mean hot molten salt thermal batteries? Because I think the other poster is referring to the first kind.
i thought sodium batteries need low hundreds C for ceramic electrolyte to work. i stand corrected
e: CATL made sodium-ion battery, i was thinking of sodium-sulfur battery
Pumped hydro is both very geologically limited and environmentally detrimental. That technology alone will not substantially reduce the need for other power storage technologies/ peaker plants.
at least it works at scale relevant to grids. there are other interesting devices that store high grade heat in things like molten silicon or sand, then convert it to electric energy again, but it’s rather at prototype scale now i think. power to hydrogen is fine if it’s replacing hydrogen from natural gas, but it’s wack for storage of energy
Pumped hydro is both very geologically limited and environmentally detrimental.
If you are willing to live with the very considerable impact and are willing to do a costly megaproject, one possibility that I’ve raised before: it’d be possible to go implement Atlantropa, but instead of using it (exclusively) to generate hydroelectric power, as its creator envisioned, use it for pumped storage. The world will never need more energy storage than that could provide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantropa
Atlantropa, also referred to as Panropa,[1] was a gigantic engineering and colonisation idea that German architect Herman Sörgel devised in the 1920s, and promoted until his death in 1952.[2][3] The proposal included several hydroelectric dams at key points on the Mediterranean Sea, such as the Strait of Gibraltar and the Bosporus, to cause a sea level drop and reclaim land.
The central feature of the Atlantropa proposal was to build a hydroelectric dam across the Strait of Gibraltar, which would have generated enormous amounts of hydroelectricity[4] and would have led to the lowering of the surface of the Mediterranean Sea by as much as 200 metres (660 ft), opening up large new areas of land for settlement, such as in the Adriatic Sea. Four other major dams were also proposed:[5][6][7]
- Across the Dardanelles to hold back the Black Sea
- Between Sicily and Tunisia to provide a roadway and to lower the inner Mediterranean further
- On the Congo River below its Kasai River tributary, to refill the Chad basin around Lake Chad, provide fresh water to irrigate the Sahara, and create a shipping lane to the interior of Africa
- Extending the Suez Canal and locks to maintain connection with the Red Sea
Sörgel saw his scheme, which was projected to take more than a century, as a peaceful pan-European alternative to the Lebensraum concepts that later became one of the stated reasons for Nazi Germany’s conquest of new territories. He envisioned Atlantropa as a way of providing land, food, employment, electric power, and, most of all, a new vision for Europe and neighbouring Africa.
There are two very considerable issues there:
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First, dropping the Mediterranean Sea by 200 meters is going to have a very large impact on the coasts of northern Africa and southern Europe. Sörgel considered that desirable, but obviously there are going to be a lot of people who don’t like such a change.
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Second, if it’s permitted to build structures in this new area – as was originally intended – then a rupture of the dams would produce cataclysmic flooding; we would essentially have recreated the Zanclean flood:
Ninety percent of the Mediterranean Basin flooding occurred abruptly during a period estimated to have been between several months and two years, following low water discharges that could have lasted for several thousand years.[3] Sea level rise in the basin may have reached rates at times greater than ten metres per day (thirty feet per day). Based on the erosion features preserved until modern times under the Pliocene sediment, Garcia-Castellanos et al. estimate that water rushed down a drop of more than 1,000 metres (3,000 ft) with a maximum discharge of about 100 million cubic metres per second (3.5 billion cubic feet per second), about 1,000 times that of the present-day Amazon River.
The Royal Air Force bombed two dams in Germany during World War 2 to flood an industrial area in Germany. Russia just blew up a hydroelectric dam in Ukraine that caused a mess and water to drop upstream by 2 meters. If such a dam were to be attacked in a war like that, it would be horrendous. We’d be talking about a water depth difference a hundred times that and a far larger area.
EDIT: And a third, I suppose – if you take water out of the Mediterranean via evaporation and pumping, it will eventually wind up elsewhere, and we live in an era where sea level rise is already a concern, so it’ll cause sea level rise elsewhere. Would eliminate concerns about sea level rise for the Mediterranean, though…
There is also the issue that if building nuclear plants takes too long and is too expensive to be the solution, then such a project would also be too late to matter. Also transmission losses likely mean this is a solution for much less of the world population than you think. If we had a truly global lossless grid, then we would need much less energy storage to begin with.
Impracticalities aside, absurd geoengineering what-ifs are entertaining. Thanks for sharing.
There are plenty of alternatives for lithium batteries, chiefly sodium and a redox flow. Heating/cooling is good as well to store, but not every structure is energy efficient enough that it would make much sense. Good thing to work towards, but grid batteries would probably be faster and easier to implement. I have reservations towards pumped hydropower, in part due to watching how hard it is to decommission a lot of hydroelectric dams these days in US as well as the cost to create the areas to hold the water (a lot of the areas that are geographically advantageous for pumped hydropower tend to be nature reserves or national parks, soo…).
i have a sneaking suspicion that if 80%+ of energy is used on heating anyway then storing that heat at point of use and topping it up when excess energy is available is the easiest, least wasteful way to go
redox flow doesn’t have that much better energy density. granted, it’s great for long term storage, but it’s still not there, plus it takes stupidly large amounts of vanadium to run. there’s also zinc bromide flow battery but this one deposits zinc so it’s limited on one side
Since most energy is used for heat, storing it as heat makes a lot of sense, and there are sand thermal storage systems that can scale from single household to whole neighborhoods.
But then you’re just having another system for storing energy, which probably isn’t very easy to implement. An easier solution if you don’t want to use grid batteries is just to improve housing insulation and schedule heating/cooling for non peak hours, so that you are just using less energy overall. The problem in my mind is that that would require a lot of renovation on older homes, which is just more expensive and slower than adding grid batteries. Don’t get me wrong, those changes should be mandated for newer housing, but expecting it to be implemented in older housing probably isn’t gonna happen.
They’re already using them in Finland. And there’s a company building them for residential applications
If you take something not unlike a water heater and fill it with sand that you then heat to about 1,000 degrees farenheit. Then when you need heat you just pump some air through it and use that feed of hot air to provide heat where you need it. And unlike heat pumps, this can be added to the sort of baseboard heat you find in a lot of older homes.
And since the heaters are just simple resistive coils with 100% efficiency, it’s a simple and cheap way to store electricity that you’re going to use for heating anyway. Remember that every time you change energy from one kind to another you’re going to lose some of it in the process.
Lithium Ion is more advanced battery technology because it’s got high energy density which means it’s used in consumer electronics. Lower energy density technologies exist with better properties for storing at grid scale. They’re heavier and bigger than lithium ion batteries, but can store energy a lot longer and use much more available materials. One example is Form Energy’s Iron/Air battery, which uses rusting iron to store electricity for hundreds of hours.
You know what pumped storage hydro is? A battery. Unfortunately that is not an option everywhere and takes up a massive amount of space. The space portion is not a huge issue for grid energy storage for the most part but it can definitely limit where you can do it and its capacity.
As for the amount of lithium available, there is absolutely more than enough considering it is one of the most abundant materials on our planet. Not that we need to use lithium for grid energy storage. Lithium is very high density energy storage which you are correct that is not a high priority for grid energy storage.
Basically there is no one solution for grid energy storage. There are mechanical batteries, medium density chemical batteries, and even “depleted” EV batteries. We just need to apply what is right for each particular scenario.
I’m not disagreeing with you overall. But I figured more info and context is helpful.
Wait they’re still adding natural gas? Geez.
The moment you realize that any clean energy we produce and have been producing for the last 20 years, that the renewable industry boomed exponentially, only serves as additive energy and not as a replacement for non-renewables, because our demands in energy have been exponentially ever-increasing since the 1950s and that the economy doubles in size every 20 years since then. So no matter the remarkable advances in solar and wind, we still needed more energy than that, because that’s how exponents work.
But yeah, let’s continue doing business as usual, this will definitely work.
I wish you were wrong. But…
This was my first thought. I guess if you’re replacing a coal plant it’s not completely terrible, but be prepared to turn it off in 10 or 20 years.
A Climate Town video convinced me natural gas actually manages to be worse.
Natural gas is methane, and it’s extremely hard to handle that without having any leaks, ever. And since methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas, it doesn’t take that much leaked gas to cross the line into “worse than coal”.
And there are lots of leaks.
