No, of course not. But maybe we should target growth in renewables infrastructure, setting targets for wind and solar and EVs and heat pumps. These are direct targets, in order to achieve the indirect target of peaking and then reducing emissions, which will in turn lead to temperatures stopping rising.
From Just Have a Think.
Intra-day storage — soaking up solar at the middle of the day to be released in the evening and overnight — is perfectly feasible using lithium-ion or sodium-ion batteries, which are getting cheaper and cheaper. But what happens when there are prolonged spells where there is little solar, no wind, and high demand because it's cold, what the Germans have dubbed dunkelflaute (doonkel-flowta)? For that we need long-duration storage, which I've talked about before.
One of the options for long-duration storage is the iron-air battery. And it's now in commercial production in the US. The video below from Just Have A Think discusses it.
From Just Have a Think
From Just Have a Think
This will have very severe consequences. Yet our politicians and élites continue to do nothing to stop catastrophic global warming. One key point: we are likely to see 2 degrees of warming within 20 years.
An excellent video.
From Just Have A Think
From Just Have a Think
Two quotes:
The legal mandate to record forest biomass-fired energy as contributing to the EU's renewable energy targets has had the perverse effect of creating a demand for trees to be felled in Europe or elsewhere in order to burn them for energy, thus releasing the carbon into the atmosphere which would otherwise stay locked up in the forest, and simultaneously drastically reducing the carbon sink strength of the forest ecosystems;
and:
The scale of this operation is astounding, with a year's worth of [wood] pellets consumed by Drax representing wood mass approximately equivalent to clearcutting a forested square extending to 18 miles [29 kilometres] on each side.
Battery technology is developing at breath-taking speed all over the world, but China still leads the way. Now they've created batteries with such high energy density that they're using them to develop a commercial aircraft with a range of 2,000 miles - enough for most commuter flights in the US or Europe. So, has battery chemistry reached yet another previously impossible milestone?
An interesting video from Just Have A Think.
The answer: prolly, yes, because we'll need less than it seems, as only one third of primary energy ends up being used. The rest is wasted.
And the argument that we'll need massive storage is wrong. What we'll do instead is have excess renewable generation capacity, with the surplus output either being curtailed or used for processes that don't require 24/7 availability of electricity, such as desalination and charging EVs. Also, energy return on energy invested is now higher for renewables than for fossil fuels. Finally, battery technology is shifting, with new technologies such as sodium-ion using readily available, cheap minerals. Sodium-ion batteries will cost half of lithium-ion batteries.
However, there's this article which suggests that price of copper (an EV uses 4 times as much as a petrol car, mostly for wiring) is beginning a phase of secular growth. As it happens, the price of copper has fallen since then! Never mind, it happens to the best of us.
My take: as demand driven by the energy transition pushes up prices of certain commodities, advances in technology will create alternative ways to achieve the same goals. An obvious example: after the price of lithium soared, research on sodium-ion batteries took off. Now, sodium-ion batteries are commercially available and have been installed in EVs. They're not yet as energy dense as lithium-ion batteries, but they're much cheaper. And research continues.
If somebody had told you 70 years ago that we would use sunlight to produce electricity, they would have replied, had they even known about it, that it was so expensive that it could only be used for spacecraft. And anyway, where were we going to get all that silicon? Yet here we are. I'm typing this on a laptop with the power several orders of magnitude more than the first IBM computer, using sunlight to power not just it, but also my internet connection. Inconceivable 70 years ago. Routine, now.
From Just Have a Think
A rooftop combine wind and solar system with twice the efficiency of normal rooftop solar and 6 to 10 times the efficiency of small wind turbines. Very interesting.
