Quote (Black XistenZ @ 21 Sep 2023 00:19)
How is a transition to renewable energy going to bring down energy prices as long as there's no way to store excess energy from sunny/windy days for cloudy, windstill days?
Without long-term and large-scale storage, we will always have to maintain a fossil- or nuclear-based parallel infrastructure to serve as our backup grid, which is of course expensive as fuck.
Likewise, renewable energy relies on a ton of rare earths for which the bulk of global deposits lies outside of Europe. Similar story for most of the production of solar panels and wind turbines. So this idea that Europe would become self-sufficient in terms of energy by going 100% renewable, and would thus no longer rely on authoritarian and tacitly hostile regimes, is actually a pipe dream.
Indeed you are right, therefore I made a remark that energy transition will “reduce reliance on”. We will never be able to replace hydrocarbons fully.
To properly move away from fossil fuels and ensure energy supply - the only two known and proven ways for humanity so far are hydro like it was done in Norway and parts of Canada and nuclear like it was done in France (and eg Taiwan before Tsai took over and ruined it all). Hydro is not available everywhere and the other option does make you reliant on nuclear fuel to power reactors.
Indeed adding storage to the grid is an issue as it stands now as technology is not yet there to scale sufficiently. I do not believe in huge grid battery systems storing enough to supply peaks after the sun goes down + resistance heating + industry. This could work on smaller scales with houses being taken off the grid with a combo of solar panels + home battery / EV for part of the richer population.
The real alternative being explored right now is hydrogen electrolysis which can be produced cheaply during the day when electricity rates can dip into negative with excess being burned in the evening / at night. The cost of this technology is unclear and hydrogen poses unique engineering challenges as it burns too hot for modern materials and evaporates at a faster rate than LNG / causes hydrogen embrittling when transported
The problem of rare earth metals and Lithium / Cobalt does exist as they have to be extracted somewhere, but unlike fossil fuels - they only need to be purchased once and can be recycled almost indefinitely. The trick is convincing the aboriginals to sell EU all their rare earths and battery metals before they realise what’s going on. Chinese already realized that decades ago and have been busy with it.