Lithium ion battery production is estimated to reach 1TWh per year in 2023 and 2TWh per year at ~2030 [1]. If you integrate that curve, you're still looking at several decades to build enough battery capacity to fulfill the world's storage demand if solar is the primary generation source.
The wind does blow at night, but intermittently. Wind generation is even when averaged out over long stretches of time, but in the near term it can vary a lot. Some estimates for how much storage we'd need to reliably meet demand for generation that comes from solar and wind at 3 days supply. The US consumes over 10TWh of energy daily.
Why would growth slow down after 2023?
And are you’re comparing primary energy to electricity? That’s a lot of waste heat that would not need to be replicated
Anyway, we don’t need all of this by 2030 if we have large scale electrification - that will have made a lot of CO2 savings in other sectors
> And are you’re comparing primary energy to electricity? That’s a lot of waste heat that would not need to be replicated
Are there plants that scavenge waste heat from batteries? Batteries generate some waste heat, but not at temperatures that can be used to drive a turbine.
> Anyway, we don’t need all of this by 2030 if we have large scale electrification - that will have made a lot of CO2 savings in other sectors
This is the opposite of what is true. Large scale electrification will make it so that there is even more demand on the power grid as things like cars and trains that are currently being fueled by fossil fuels now draw electricity from the grid.
The wind does blow at night, but intermittently. Wind generation is even when averaged out over long stretches of time, but in the near term it can vary a lot. Some estimates for how much storage we'd need to reliably meet demand for generation that comes from solar and wind at 3 days supply. The US consumes over 10TWh of energy daily.
1. https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/14/global-lithium-ion-batt...