Paul Krugman this morning offers some TGIF news. Batteries work and are getting cheaper. Drastically so:
The decline in battery prices has been incredible. It’s like nothing anyone has ever seen before. Big, strong men with tears in their eyes come up to me and say, “Sir, have you seen the progress in batteries?”:
Why does this matter?
First, cheap battery storage of electricity greatly mitigates the problem of intermittency — the sun doesn’t always shine, the wind doesn’t always blow. This was a major concern early in the renewable revolution. Some energy economists scolded me for my naïve optimism when I first wrote about solar technology way back in 2011. But solar + batteries provides round-the-clock power.
Here’s a graph of California’s electricity supply generated by renewables and batteries over the course of 24 hours on April 1 that illustrates my point:
During the middle of the day, California generates lots of electricity from solar. Much of it is poured into batteries, which provide electricity when the sun sets. Californians don’t even notice the switch.
In engineering school I heard one professor casually mention to another that students were not considering power density in their mechanical designs. I never heard another word about it in any class. But Krugman references it:
Second, battery performance has soared as prices have plunged. Crucially, there has been a huge increase in batteries’ volumetric energy density: the amount of electricity that can be stored in a given space. Until a few years ago the energy density of gasoline gave internal combustion a huge advantage over electric vehicles. But no longer.
For any geeks out there, follow the link in the paragraph above.
While Trump fiddles in Iran, he’s burning more fossil fuels at home while surrendering the renewables market to China. (So much winning.) But he cannot stop the renewables future, Krugman writes.
