People really tend to forget that natural gas + variable renewable energies is the current cheapest/more profitable option, but is overall non sustainable.
Storage + VRE is barely existent because energy provider aren’t incentivised to build it.
That’s why I’m excited for non-Lithium batteries coming via consumer tech.
Energy providers haven’t been incentivized to invest in R&D because any new tech will also be available to their competitors, and they’re all fighting over pieces of the same pie.
With all the alternative battery chemistries out there, there should be one that could make storage + VRE cheaper than gas. However it takes a lot of money to turn them into a mass-producible product. If energy providers aren’t motivated and governments aren’t making big investments, it seems like R&D from consumer tech is our only hope at the moment, at least until grid battery storage becomes a big enough industry to fund its own R&D.
Arg, my first reply was completely off topic. I thought this was a reply in another post.
Yeah, it’s great that VRE is cheaper now, but we shouldn’t celebrate companies/countries for just taking the cheapest option. It drowns out the legitimate celebration of the companies/countries that are actually making hard decisions by funding renewables when they aren’t the cheapest option, investing in long-term R&D, taxing carbon, fixing bureaucratically-entrenched perverse incentive structures, etc.
People really tend to forget that natural gas + variable renewable energies is the current cheapest/more profitable option, but is overall non sustainable.
Storage + VRE is barely existent because energy provider aren’t incentivised to build it.
That’s why I’m excited for non-Lithium batteries coming via consumer tech.
Energy providers haven’t been incentivized to invest in R&D because any new tech will also be available to their competitors, and they’re all fighting over pieces of the same pie.
With all the alternative battery chemistries out there, there should be one that could make storage + VRE cheaper than gas. However it takes a lot of money to turn them into a mass-producible product. If energy providers aren’t motivated and governments aren’t making big investments, it seems like R&D from consumer tech is our only hope at the moment, at least until grid battery storage becomes a big enough industry to fund its own R&D.
Arg, my first reply was completely off topic. I thought this was a reply in another post.
Yeah, it’s great that VRE is cheaper now, but we shouldn’t celebrate companies/countries for just taking the cheapest option. It drowns out the legitimate celebration of the companies/countries that are actually making hard decisions by funding renewables when they aren’t the cheapest option, investing in long-term R&D, taxing carbon, fixing bureaucratically-entrenched perverse incentive structures, etc.