> There are several islands already running on solar, wind, and batteries alone.
EDIT Which is awesome, and surely beats running diesel generators!
Which presumably don't have large, dense cities nor heavy industry?
> If every six months the rate at which a million EVs are sold, how much battery storage is that over the next decade? My math says tens of GWs.
Battery costs are orders of magnitude too high to make sense for anything but very short term storage. Yes, they are fantastic for some ancillary services like frequency control. And with lots of solar and air conditioning, might allow you to get past the duck curve hump in the evenings.
Providing energy for a couple weeks when a high pressure system has parked on your country and wind produces 0? Forget it.
Iceland has a lot of industrial aluminum smelting operations there because they have very low cost renewable hydro power...
Flow batteries will come online to carry the storage past where high volume production lithium cost savings can't reach. I think if we put nearly the same or as consistent capital into renewable as we put into even the last decade of fossil fuel discovery, we'll find that costs drop very very rapidly.
EDIT Which is awesome, and surely beats running diesel generators!
Which presumably don't have large, dense cities nor heavy industry?
> If every six months the rate at which a million EVs are sold, how much battery storage is that over the next decade? My math says tens of GWs.
Battery costs are orders of magnitude too high to make sense for anything but very short term storage. Yes, they are fantastic for some ancillary services like frequency control. And with lots of solar and air conditioning, might allow you to get past the duck curve hump in the evenings.
Providing energy for a couple weeks when a high pressure system has parked on your country and wind produces 0? Forget it.