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Battery storage is in some ways the last peice of the puzzle for renewable transition. First the day storage, which this almost certainly is and the long term storage which is a problem for the near future.
Things are going to change rapidly if fossil fuels plants are going to be undercut 24/7 for days/weeks/ months at a time.
I always point at Norway and Quebec, which utilize hydroelectric heavily. Not only do they have some of the cheapest power on the planet (in terms of production costs, there are plenty of poor oil countries that provide power effectively for free), but that cheap renewable energy has resulted in 70% of home heating and a chunk of industrial use migrating to green energy.
As I always mention, electricity generation is just one form of energy use. There's also industrial use, transportation, and home heating. If electricity generation ends up cheaper than using fossil fuels, then it becomes much simpler to move all those other forms of energy use off of fossil fuels, so it has an outsized impact even greater than just supplanting fossil fuels for electricity generation.
And, as I always point out, the opposite is true. If we force the implementation of technologies that drive the cost of electricity up, then industry, transportation, and home heating will be driven towards burning fossil fuels, which can be highly counterproductive.
There is a big problem with that and that is that the most expensive electricity source is the price of electricity. The problem for renewables and nuclear is that most of them are expensive up front, but cheap to operate. So you end up in a position were you pay for the expensive fossil fuels and for adding clean electricity, without having the lower prices of clean electricity. That becomes really bad as the things like home heating and industry are long term decisiosn. You do not replace your boiler every few years as they last for decades. So you have to have policy to drive adoption of those technologies regardless of the price of electricity. Long term that is going to be mostly cheaper, but short term that it will not.
Honest question, what good is energy storage infrastructure if everything from Lead-Acid to Lithium ion batteries degrade in a matter of a few years?
We talking capacitors?
The simple answer is that by running your batteries properly they do not degrate nearly as fast. However doing that lowers the energy which can be stored in the battery. So consumer electronics do not do that. Also important to say is that even at half the storage capacity they are extremely usefull, so degradation is not as much of a problem.
Battery degradation isn't as much of a concern in these cases. Batteries that are designed for grid backup use a more resilient chemistry which makes them heavier, but also last longer.
Consumer whole home backup batteries advertise the batteries having over 90% capacity after 10 years.
In a grid storage application, 90% of the original capacity is still fine, and as other commenters have pointed out, the batteries are recyclable.
Lithium ion can have over 1000 charge cycles.
Sodium ion which is only really began manufacturing last year is in the thousands of cycles with expected prices to be lower than lithium ion. I'm not an expect by any means but I think that it will replace lithium ion in the grid market.
Both of the batteries can be recycled and reused.
But really to answer in the most fundamental way of what use it is? Well it pays for itself. People are installing these batteries because over the lifetime of the battery they make the owners a profit and that's with lithium ion which really isn't great for grid storage, but it is all we have a scale right now.
@AllonzeeLV @Wanderer
therefore we must think of energy storage beyond lithium. Heat storage pools, lifted water for kinetic energy and so on.
One thing we have to be wary of is that batteries don't last forever. I like the idea of having battery storage, but there needs to be a whole lifecycle. I believe lead acid batteries are extremely recyclable, however.
Lithium based batteries are also extremely recyclable.