As someone who has spent most my professional life in the global energy and commodities space both as an economist and as a trader, I have grown increasingly concerned about the way grid-scale battery storage is portrayed in public discourse. If you have paid any attention to the headlines, you would have heard that battery technology is “on the verge of solving” the intermittency problem of wind and solar energy. According to this narrative, all we need to do is build more battery storage, and the path to “net zero” will unfold automatically… magically.
If only it were that simple…
In my latest blog post “Pros and Cons of Utility-Scale Battery Storage” I unpack the many assumptions behind this belief. The facts I present may be unpopular, but they are grounded in physics, not politics.
Here a couple of key points that I feel might spark some interest.
35 million tons of raw materials for a couple of hours…
To build a 50 GWh utility-scale lithium-ion battery system (approx. annual output of a Gigafactory), which has the ability to store electricity, for a city like New York, for only a few hours, you need ~ 35 million tons of raw materials (~ 700,000 t per GWh). That roughly covers the mining, upgrading, transport, and processing of ores like lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite, iron ore, bauxite, and others.
Think about it like this…a 1-ton utility-scale battery has a storage capacity of around 100 kWh and requires ~ 70 tons of mined, processed, and manufactured raw materials to be manufactured. This is the energy equivalent of about ~40 kg of coal or ~20 litres of oil.
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