Good evening! This week's edition of the In Common newsletter comes from Craig Dalzell, head of policy and research at Common Weal.
The problem with renewable energy, we’ve been told for decades, is that it doesn’t work on the schedules of our choosing. Turbines don’t turn when there’s no wind. The sun doesn’t shine at night. And therefore we need fossil fuels and nuclear power plants. Only they are reliable enough to power our society 24 hours a day.
And so, even though we bake in the hottest year of our lives, again , and look forward to every year of the rest of our lives being even hotter. Even though thousands in Britain and thousands more across Europe will not now ever live to see a hotter year – the magnitude of death going almost unnoticed by the media in a way that it would not had it been an act of terrorism. Even as the same people who caused those deaths lobby our governments to let them cause more and make money doing so. Even as all that happens, we’re still told that renewables could never replace fossil fuels because the sun doesn’t shine at night.
What if it did though?
I’m not talking about the Techbro supervillain idea being trailed by an American company to put mirrors in orbit to reflect sunlight. That won’t work, will only burn billions of dollars that could have been spent more sensibly and even if the mirrors launch they will cause untold damage to the environment, to scientific equipment like telescopes and will further wreck our shared Commons that is our view into space.
A much more down-to-Earth solution is, of course, batteries. Battery technology has come on faster than anyone – including renewable energy optimists – could have predicted. Twelve years ago, while Scotland was having its independence referendum, a grid-scale battery cost around $300 per kWh (a kilowatt.hour is a unit of stored energy – a 1kWh battery could run a 1kW electric heater continuously for one hour). By 2019 when we published our Common Home Plan, the price had more than halved and was closing in on $100/kWh which was considered a major milestone in technological achievement (not for any real physical reason – humans just like round numbers).
Now, batteries cost closer to $60/kWh and we’re starting to approach a real milestone. One that will really change the game in terms of how we use these things.
That milestone is $20/kWh. At $20, these batteries cross a threshold. Connected to enough solar panels to charge them (solar panels have also dropped in price by an astounding degree and now generate human-usable energy cheaper than any technology ever invented by humans going right back to when we first harnessed fire), a $20 battery is capable to delivering energy cheaper than coal, cheaper than nuclear and cheaper than gas.
With just solar panels and batteries, the economic case for burning fossil fuels at night disappears. The fact that batteries can ramp up their delivery very quickly also means that they can take over the job currently done by “peaker” gas turbines that kick on when there is sudden high demand for short periods of time. These peaker plants are the most expensive form of generation on the grid and so replacing them with cheap batteries will have a substantial impact on our energy bills as well as our environmental emissions.
Chinese company BYD has announced that it aims to be the ones to crack that threshold. They are launching a $40/kWh battery next year with further improvements in the months after. Unlike the lithium batteries which have dominated the sector until now, the new battery will be based on sodium.
Sodium is safer to deploy (sodium fires aren’t great, but they’re not as runaway explosive as lithium fires are), easier to extract (you can get it from the salt in seawater) and is a lot cheaper and overall more plentiful than lithium. The major downside is that a sodium battery of a certain size will never store as much energy as the same size of lithium battery. This is a problem for electric vehicles (though sodium battery cars designed to make short hops within towns are coming online too) but less so for grid-scale batteries where space is less of a factor.
Crucially, for Scotland, sodium batteries have the advantage that we could make them here if we wanted to. Scotland doesn’t have substantial lithium deposits but we have plenty of salt in our seas!
Of course, the substantial delays in the kind of investment that Scotland should have been doing to make that happen mean that China has stolen the march from us as they have in so much else of the energy sector. It’s not too late for Scotland. As I said in a recent column ( “Scotland is already losing out on green energy. Here's what we can do” ), even if we’re forced to buy Chinese tech to push forward our green transition as urgently as we need to right now, we should also recognise that that tech has a finite lifespan of a few decades and so we should be investing now so that the tech we replace it with is manufactured domestically.
Environmentalists have predicted this moment for decades – decades that were stretched out longer because the oil barons convinced politicians to line their pockets a little longer – but economics now mean that it’s finally here. The transition is unstoppable. Renewables are the future we need. Scotland should work to be on the right side of that future rather than being left behind with the past.
