Comment on Solar power surpasses coal in EU for first time
humanspiral@lemmy.ca 6 days ago1.4 TWh every day
This means you would need about 701 GWh of storage capacity in total.
Less because most electricity is consumed in daytime, or can be incentivized to with Summer solar.
so roungly 1 car per 12 people should do the trick.
US sells 1 car per 20 people every year. Not sure about Germany. But if same, 20% of car sales as EVs is potential to meet that in 3 years.
Meeting the demands of one country is entirely doable, but the rest of the world uses electricity too.
11m EVs sold in China 2024. Lithium prices not skyrocketing, and so production level could absorb more.
We really need to develop some alternate energy storage solutions that don’t depend on relatively rare elements like lithium and cobalt. For example, sodium, magnesium, sulfur, oxygen would be great alternatives if we just figure out how to make viable batteries out of them.
Sodium Ion batteries are in commercial production now. It does mean unlimited battery materials for humanity. Lithium is not particularly rare though. It is Nickel and Cobalt that are rare, and LFP doesn’t use those. Hydrogen is important to just have alternate use of both abundant renewables, and abundant batteries.
Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz 6 days ago
Totally forgot about hydrogen. Using that technology in cars has proven to be possible in Norway, so clearly that’s an option too. When energy production exceeds demand, it makes sense to dump that energy into hydrolysis, and later use that hydrogen when the opposite happens. You could use that with industrial scale solutions and cars as well, so that seems like viable strategy.