this post was submitted on 24 May 2025
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Our best current alternative option that's already there is sadly gas. It's fast, cheap and emissions are not the worst of the bunch. Still bad though.
As far as battery storage is concerned, battery prices have dropped 97% in the last three decades (and it's still dropping quite quickly). See https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline for a pretty good overview. And that's not taking into account other forms of energy storage like water-based storage or new batteries based on sodium.
The batteries we have now are already cheap enough to purchase for individual customers, and including solar panels means it's already possible to effectively take houses off the grid. In 10 years those prices will be 50-25% of their current price in pessimistic scenarios. Solar is dropping in price at similar rates.
Yep, gas is a good climate warming enabler. Which we want to avoid since we are fighting climate warming - funny eh, that renewables instead of nuclear causes more gas/coal being burned.
As for batteries, perhaps, but today we don't have any of those at scale required. And while houses could get off grid today with li-ion batteries where lithium is not infinite (nor are rare earths required), it doesn't solve cities and industry or energy storage at scale. Plus those batteries tend to catch fire which is hard to extinguish. Water based storage is limited by geography. And so on.