solarpunk memes

We have the storage technologies, the only thing missing is money.

When discussing large public projects whose scale is larger than anything before seen, the money is mainly an accounting placeholder for the real resources that need to be expended.

Grid scale storage has been expanding at an exponential pace, but the sheer magnitude of the materials and engineering work that needs to be done to make a dent is pretty huge.

Bloomberg projects that total cumulative installed capacity should hit 2 Terawatt hours by 2035, noting that would represent 8x the number for 2025. But when you compare those numbers to just how much electricity is produced or consumed, with 22,000 TWh per year, we're talking about demand periods measured in minutes, not even hours, much less days.

At scales large enough to make enough of a dent to show up in global energy stats, we need to recognize that even infinite money would run into the real resource constraints of how much capacity we as a species have for pulling minerals out of the ground, processing them into useful materials, and engineering them to be useful energy storage solutions (whether pumped hydro or other gravitational systems, compressed air, flywheels, or whatever battery or fuel cell chemistries can store energy in an efficient way).

We have some technologies, but need things to improve significantly before storage can actually meet the needs for power that meets demand at any given moment in time. In the meantime, matching supply and demand in real time is a true engineering challenge, not just a monetary challenge.