They are. Modeling has shown that getting Australia to 98.8% renewable is highly achievable.
https://cosmosmagazine.com/technology/energy/grid-renewable-electricity-simulation/
Austrailia is one of the best places in the world to do that, but it should be pointed out that the article you linked wants 120GWh of batteries (costing ~12 billion USD at current Li-ion prices) as well as building more than 38GW of wind power and 30GW of solar power in order to meet ~25GW of average demand and that still needs pumped hydro on top and more than 9GW of fossil fuel power to make up the gaps.
It’s just about feasible in Australia with excess sun and wind, plenty of empy space, low population density and terrain amenable to hydro storage. But it isnt realy generalisable to most other places.
30GW of solar is not much. Germany built 13GW this year.
Germany has more than 3 times the population of Australia, and the article linked needed to be able to generate 30GW peak so likely required more installed capacity, and solar is only 1 element out of 5 required in that scenario.
Again it does seem to be feasible to get renewable only in Australia (or close to) but I dont think that tells you much about elsewhere
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It is possible that new battery chemistries or compressed air storage may prove cheap enough to use for long term storage.
There are plenty of options to choose from, but only few are actually industrial grade at the moment. So many promising ones are still in pilot stage, and I’m really looking forward to seeing which ones actually prove to be viable.
Traditional lithium based batteries clearly aren’t it, but LFP looks ok though.
The salt batteries will be even cheaper than lfp, they just take even more space, but we got lots of space to put batteries.
Exactly. Grid energy storage doesn’t have to be light or small. It’s not going anywhere, and you can build such facilities in remote locations.
Who cares if it weighs as much as a factory and takes the same space. You could go with molten calcium, redox flow batteries or even wilder technologies.
