A million miles battery is something Tesla believe they will have in their cars soon. And it seems other car makers are confident abouot that. 20-30 years seems like an absurdly negative assumption.
Your analysis of the economic of car batteries completely ignore the concept of sunk cost. If I have already bought a car to drive around and the battery lasts longer than my car, then using that car battery for energy storage costs me exactly zero. You got to think marginal cost here, not total cost.
Since we are transitioning to EVs anyway we get a large amount of battery storage for free. Think about Air BnB or Uber. It is based the same idea. Regular people sit with some asset which isn't being used anyway. With bidirectonal charging we are able to utilize an energy storage system which will already exist. You don't have to pay for it. You simply have to build a system to enable it. Okay, that costs some money but much less than buying those batteries for the sole reason of using them for grid storage.
> You need to broaden you outlook to not think of electricity storage, but energy storage. It will open your mind.
I have long time ago, but that is not the topic of this discussion. Of course we will need many types of energy storage systems, but the topic of this discussion is electric cars. The point I am trying to get across is that EVs will be an valuable asset in the renewable energy transition we will be going through.
Should they be the only energy storage solution? Of course not. I think cryogenic and thermal storage has a lot going for it. Thermal storage you can do with concentrated solar, heat generating wind turbines as well as with various nuclear power designs such as molten salt reactors or high temperature gas cooled reactors.
> You should also note that electricity is only 30% of worldwide energy usage. Currently 60% of electricity is generated by fossil.
That is a non sequitur. We are specifically talking about the role of EVs in the energy system. Why do we need to expand that discussion to talk about all possible energy storage solutions and energy usage?
Hey I think geothermal heath pumps should be used for for heating homes and offices. But that is not relevant to this discussion.
> The scale of plugging in EV batteries is far too small and too expensive a source for future storage requirements.
I am not suggesting that is the whole solution, simply that it can be an important part of the puzzle. With more EVs we make this a possiblity. Whether it will be utilized or not is another matter.
OP however too a far too bleak view of EVs ignoring all possible solutions you can build around them or improvements in technology involved in constructing them.
Given an industry which has improved so rapidly, that makes no sense. Many of the alternative solutions he sketches evolves far more slowly. I have followed the usage of algae for biofuel production for many years. It is clear that this techonology is evolving much more slowly than battery technology.
The use of hydrogen for energy storage is something I have followed since the 1980s. It still hasn't made much of a difference. Battery technology has evovled at a tremendous pace and ignorcing the speed of that development would be a mistake.
