In a field rife with bad, worse, still worse, and even dangerously incompetent work, I don't know if I've ever seen anything as shockingly inept as the Report just out from the International Energy Agency with the title "Batteries and Secure Energy Transitions." The Report has a date only specified to the month of "April 2024," but the press release came out just two days ago on April 25.
Are you familiar with the International Energy Agency? It is not part of the UN, but rather a separate consortium currently of some 40 countries, mostly Western and mostly rich, founded in the wake of the oil shocks of the 1970s with a then-goal of promoting energy security.
The thesis of the Report is that batteries, and particularly lithium ion batteries, are the key to the impending energy transition, and need to be scaled up massively and immediately with whatever amount of government subsidies and handouts that it takes.
Those include: Quantitatively, how much energy storage, in watt-hours will be necessary to provide full back-up to a national electricity grid once all fossil fuel back-up has been banished and the storage is all that is available when the instantaneous generators are not supplying the full demand? How much will that amount of storage cost? What is the maximum length of time that energy must be held in storage before it is called upon, and is the proposed storage technology capable of the task of storing energy for that period of time? There are other comparably important questions, but at least those are absolutely essential.
Battery storage in the power sector was the fastest growing energy technology in 2023 that was commercially available, with deployment more than doubling year-on-year.
" More from page 12: "Batteries are key to the transition away from fossil fuels and accelerate the pace of energy efficiency through electrification and greater use of renewables in power.
" Still on page 12: "To triple global renewable energy capacity by 2030 while maintaining electricity security, energy storage needs to increase six-times.
To facilitate the rapid uptake of new solar PV and wind, global energy storage capacity increases to 1 500 GW by 2030 in the NZE Scenario, which meets the Paris Agreement target of limiting global average temperature increases to 1.5°C or less in 2100.
In my own energy storage report, I calculated that to reach a zero-emissions electricity sector that could get through a year without fossil fuel back-up would require increasing energy storage by something around 10,000 times.
How about the question of the length of time that energy must remain in storage to back-up a wind/solar powered grid, and whether the proposed technology is up to the task? In my own report, which only considered scenarios of getting through a single year, I showed that much of the stored energy would need to be held for 6 - 12 months before use.
For even longer duration storage, such as seasonal storage, battery technologies are not fit for purpose, and other mechanical, e.g. pumped storage hydro, and chemical, e.g. hydrogen storage, technologies need to be deployed.
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