RENEWABLES NEED TRANSMISSION!!! We need to be building unprecedented Manhattan project levels of transmission, yesterday! But instead we will put some solar panels on a car park and feel like we did our part. Solar is the easy part. Storage and/or transmission is the hard part.
This logic eats its own tail. Yes, if battery storage was cheap a lot of things would be monumentally better. It isn't. We need today solutions, not hypothetical ones.
Energy storage technology is on a roll, and grid storage isn't limited by weight energy density in the same manner as vehicle batteries are.
The current limiting factor is the number of factories making batteries, not the cost per deferred kWh of the batteries they do make.
But only the Chinese have either the capability to, or interest in, building a one-square-meter-cross-section aluminium belt around the planet, and that means a geopolitical faff.
Where "sufficiently cheap" here means "affordable over intercontinental distances".
I believe storage costs are falling faster than transmission costs.
* The scale is such that it's more of an opportunity cost than a dollar cost, what else can be done with 5% of Chinese aluminium per year for the next 20-or-so years.
But also, much research needed before a true price tag can be attached, rather than just a bill of materials
Not very, but neither is continuing to use fossil fuels on a huge scale.
When all the power plants are green, all of the energy you use to build green power plants is necessarily green.
How green a new power plant is, during the process of construction, is a statement of how much progress you've already made before this step, not how much you make in the act of making this step.
You state this as if that's a fact - just because you haven't looked for them doesn't mean they don't exist. Here's two examples showing that wind [1] and solar [2] have good environmental payback times in my home country due to avoided emissions, a country which already has an ~80% renewable grid. Additionally, [3] is a good resource that puts the potential waste from solar farms into context with other sources (such as coal ash) and shows this is an unfounded fear. Do some research and challenge your biases before you spread misinformation.
[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03036758.2024.2...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0038092X2...
[3] https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-023-02230-0
[3 - sharing link] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-023-02230-0.epdf?shar...
