My parents have installed an 8kWh battery backup because frankly it sucks not to have power 4-8 hours a day. Pretty much everyone in South Africa who can afford one is installing one! But it's really stupendously expensive and it makes me think about how ridiculous the people suggesting that grid scale storage is viable are.
Look. I don't think we will never be able to do grid scale storage. There's lots of promising new battery and capacitor technologies. I give it decent odds that in the next century someone will develop a battery that rivals kerosene for cost per kWh of storage. But whenever we talk about tools for solving climate change I feel like a lot of people forget that it's a pretty imminent problem!
If I told you "hey, I know you're looking at that Toyota Corolla so you can drive to work. Well, I'm working on a flying car. It's going to be so much faster, and it'll cost the same amount as a Toyota Corolla, and I'll have it ready in a few months. Look, I've got this tiny scale model to show you that it's on the way, please give me the money you were going to spend on the Toyota Corolla and I'll give you a flying car when it's ready." you would laugh at me. Every single engineering project comes in over budget and over time, if it's finished at all. Scale models are nothing when you need to solve big problems. Everyone understands this with bridges, why do they not get it with gridscale storage.
Every day some guy says "hey look we built a sodium battery pack it took our lab six months to build 100kWh worth but we totally promise that we'll have mass production down by 2025 please don't think about whether you are designing a future grid heavily dependent on fossil fuel baseloads we'll have huge batteries by then look there's the one in Australia it stores literally seconds worth of grid capacity." and I feel like I'm going insane.
This is not a technology that is "ready to go" this is the shit we make fun of when a university PR department claims they've cured cancer (in mouse cells (in a culture ( with additional marker proteins (and killed the healthy cells too whoops))))
All the current climate change targets are aiming for things in 2050 and it feels like gridscale storage gets used as an easy excuse for politicians who don't want to explain why they're making a grid that happens to be completely reliant on fossil fuels. They just go "oh we're investing in renewable technologies ;)" while sheepishly standing in front of the gas pipelines.
They might not even be industry shills! Some of them are but I think some of them are genuinely taken in by the renewables grift. They see the endless fields of wind farms when they visit the German countryside or whatever and think wow :) renewables really work :) we're going to fix climate change :) and have never understood an eqCO2/kWh value in their life.
People reporting on SMR and renewables say things like "Nuclear is too expensive and impractical compared to wind and solar which is why we're not investing in it" but that's only true if you believe you can run a grid on wind and solar alone! Otherwise you have to say the quiet "and hundreds of gas turbines with fuel storage on standby" part out loud.
