Batteries will save the world / Zohran won! 😵💫😭🥹🥳
Folks, Zohran Kwame Mamdani is going to be the next Mayor of New York City!!
How much of this historic victory can be ascribed to last week's endorsement by the very publication you are now reading? Historians will have their say. But we know this: Green Juice is batting 1000.
All jokes aside, my partner and I have been knocking doors, petitioning, postering, phone banking, persuading, and poll visibility-ing since the frigid days of February with hand-warmers in our pockets through the ongoing heatwave when just yesterday I stood 100 feet from our polling place in the 100-degree heat for what felt like 100 hours, talking to my neighbors about the world as we may yet know it.
This is the first political campaign I've ever put my full heart and soul into and I couldn't be more proud. Our historically moderate neighborhood of Bed-Stuy, where we did most of our canvassing, went +46 for Zohran.
We were just a very small part of the largest volunteer corps in New York City history. More than 25,000 volunteers knocked on over 1.3 million doors—unheard of!—in service of a campaign centered on honest communication, boundless compassion, and a clear-eyed economic agenda that everyone can understand and envision. It's not rocket science: it's democratic socialism.
May a thousand Zohrans bloom.
But forget all that shit! We've got green things to discuss.
For instance, you may be surprised to hear that the fastest growing clean energy technology today isn't solar panels. It's not geothermal, hydropower, or nuclear, either. It certainly isn't wind turbines.
No, it's none other than the humble battery. Batteries are exploding (word choice?) all over the world. But it's not the latest iPhone driving this trend—cell phones and other personal devices represent just a fraction of overall battery demand.
Who's demanding all these batteries? The clean energy sector and electric vehicle manufacturers, that's who. Clean energy + EVs now account for over 90% of annual lithium-ion battery sales.
This chart from the International Energy Agency shows how much battery capacity we've been adding. The chart cuts off in 2023, when we added 41.5 gigawatts of storage globally, but rest assured, we added even more last year.
We'll talk about what 41.5 GW means later. For now, just enjoy that beautiful hockey stick curve. Yes, my friend, the Age of Batteries has arrived.
The Age of Batteries: why now?
Why are we installing so many batteries, if not to play ruinously addictive tower defense games on our girlfriend's work iPad?
Five reasons:
- Batteries enable 'variable' clean energy tech like wind and (especially) solar to provide energy around-the-clock
- Batteries will be essential to the transportation of the near future: electric cars, trucks, trains... and even planes are all coming
- After 30 years of investment, batteries have become absurdly cheap to manufacture
- That same investment has made batteries far more energy dense than anyone ever thought possible
- Breakthroughs in battery 'chemistries', i.e. the elemental components within batteries, have made batteries much, much more safe and long-lasting
We'll talk about reasons 1 and 2 in this post and save 3, 4, and 5 for another time.
Let's take it from the top.
1. Batteries and solar are the new peanut butter and jelly
We've been over this, people. The ability to store the electricity generated by solar panels in batteries allows us to use clean power even when it's not sunny.
The more batteries we have online, the more solar energy we can store, the more clean energy we can dispatch, the more reliable our clean energy grid can be.
But don't take my word for it. A piping hot report from the good folks at Ember trumpets the kind of eye-catching headline I can't resist clicking:
Solar electricity every hour of every day is here and it changes everything
Everything! They said everything!!
Check out the paper (there's an executive summary), but the TL;DR is it's now more economical (i.e. cheaper) in very sunny places to get 24/7/365 energy from a combination of solar panels and batteries than it is to generate energy from either coal plants or nuclear reactors.
"Natural" gas plant power can still be cheaper, but it's only a matter of time before solar+batteries permanently takes the crown as the cheapest form of around-the-clock energy on earth. The arrows for battery and solar costs continue pointing down, and the arrows for battery and solar efficiency continue pointing up.
Solar panels and batteries excel in several arrangements:
A. Rooftop solar + home batteries
Home batteries from companies like Enphase, when combined with rooftop solar panels, improve a home's energy resiliency. If the power grid goes down (something that's happening more and more often), a house with a solar+batteries setup can keep the lights on (and the fridge on, and the air-conditioning on) during a blackout.
Is it "fair" that wealthy homeowners can make themselves immune to power outages while the rest of us swelter in place? Well, no. That's why Mayor Zohran is going to declare eminent domain and seize all private property. Just kidding.
B. Utility-scale solar+storage
The same resiliency principle behind rooftop solar + home batteries holds true at greater scale—what we in the business call 'utility scale'. By putting a bunch of big-ass batteries and solar arrays in one place (and hooking them up to the energy grid), we can increase the resiliency of a community, a neighborhood, a town, or a city. A collection of privately owned batteries, like in the photo below, is known as a 'BESS'—Battery Energy Storage System.
A brief aside on BESS
BESS projects are typically owned by companies like Spearmint Energy, for whom my dear old friend Michael now works. Spearmint's 150 MW, 300 MWh BESS project in West Texas is one of the largest in the country.
...but what do 150 MW and 300 MWh mean?
Those numbers mean that Spearmint's battery project can dispatch (i.e. release) power at a rate of 150 megawatts, and it can store (i.e. contain) a total of 300 megawatt-hours.
The easy analogy here is a bathtub: the amount of water a tub can hold is separate from the rate at which the tub can be drained. In the energy world, you want to be able to both store a lot of energy and get that energy out of your batteries quickly when you need it.
Spearmint could theoretically dispatch 300 MWh in just two hours, at a rate of 150 MW per hour. 300 MWh is enough energy to power 10,000 large American homes for a whole day.
If you scroll up to the first chart, you'll recall the world added 41.5 gigawatts of battery capacity in 2023. That number refers to the amount of power that all the batteries installed in 2023 could theoretically dispatch at any given time. Remember from our metrics series that 1 GW = 1,000 MW. Therefore, Spearmint's 150 MW project—again, among the largest in America—would have accounted for just .0036% of all the battery power installed in 2023. I repeat: we are installing a fuck-ton of batteries worldwide.
If you're wondering how privately owned BESS projects make money, it's by selling their stores of cheaply produced solar power back to the grid when electricity becomes expensive, and also by participating in renewable power trading markets (see the Green Juice primer on RECs).
C. Microgrids
Another iteration of solar+batteries is the 'microgrid', which, as the name implies, is a tiny, self-contained version of our larger power grid. All you need for a microgrid is a power generator and a way to store that power. It can be solar+batteries, and it often is, but that's just one version. The most popular flavor of microgrid in the U.S. (for now) is actually solar+a natural gas turbine+batteries.
Microgrids can either be plugged into the mother grid or they can go 'island mode' and operate independently. Such flexibility offers many advantages. For one, you can set a microgrid up almost anywhere. You can then operate it without needing to wait years and years to get formally approved for a connection to the mother grid. By operating it independently, you can avoid paying high electricity costs from the utilities. Microgrids, if you make them big enough, are an attractive solution for powering data centers. But they can do other things, too, like provide electricity to rural and underdeveloped parts of the world. For instance, there's an ongoing movement to set up microgrids in rural Africa.
Solar+batteries are a winning combination. But batteries don't need solar to save the world. They can do it from your driveway.
2. Batteries will power the transportation of the future
Our goal, as people who dislike climate change, is to transition to a world that uses 100% renewable energy 100% of the time. Naturally, this encompasses transportation. In the future, there will be no more admittedly tasty-smelling gasoline. No more expensive, polluting jet fuel. No more gas-fired locomotives.
Battery-powered transportation will lead to many positive outcomes:
- We will no longer need fossil fuels, sourced domestically or abroad, just to get around. No more worrying about gas prices. Airfare will be cheaper—jet fuel alone accounts for up to 20% of the price of a plane ticket.
- Electric vehicles don't create pollution. Imagine biking behind a city bus and not having to breathe in toxic fumes for three blocks.
- Electric engines are much quieter than their Internal Combustion Engines (ICE) counterparts. Imagine dining al fresco on a busy street and actually being able to hold a conversation. Imagine a plane ride where you can hear the movie you're watching.
- Electric trains and trucks will make our ports and rail yards—some of the most polluted places in the country—safe for the people working and living around them.
- Electrifying (and investing in) America's trains—a subject about which I'm writing a separate essay—would bring dozens of additional benefits, from higher-speed rail to reconnecting small towns with urban areas to spurring mom and pop agriculture to transferring freight shipping from the heavy trucks destroying our highways back to freight trains.
Such a future may feel very far away indeed. Our stupid, evil, corrupt government is doing their irregular-headed best to destroy what meager progress we've made. Yet there are still signs of hope, if you know where to look.
One place to crane your noggin: the milky-white skies above Vermont, where a startup called BETA is flying homemade electric, battery-powered planes. Already, their funky aircraft can fly about 400 miles in a single charge, and recharge their batteries in less than an hour. BETA's planes will go as battery technology goes: the better batteries get, the farther they'll fly.
Meanwhile, down on the ground, Tesla is not the only American electric vehicle manufacturer turning giant batteries into cars. Rivian is a new rival showing promise. Their SUVs have a 400-mile range, fast-charging, and the company isn't owned by a ketamine-addled megalomaniac fascist (as far as I know).
Electric trains are already choo-chooing everywhere in the world except for right here in the greatest country on Earth (citation needed). India, at 94% electric, has effectively achieved its goal of full-scale rail electrification by 2030. The EU, considered a laggard, has still managed to electrify more than 60% of their railway lines.
In the U.S., less than 1% of our trains are electric. It's a travesty.
But the best electric vehicles—and the best batteries, solar panels, wind turbines... and uhh... basically everything cool—is being developed in China.
At 74% electric and growing, China is rapidly building out new high-speed rail lines; their Shanghai Maglev Train can reportedly reach speeds of 268 mph.
The electric cars they're making are unbelievable. We don't know about them here because Chinese-manufactured EVs have been tariffed at 100% since the Biden administration. But go virtually anywhere else and you'll encounter futuristic EVs from companies like BYD, Xpeng, Nio, and others that blow our weak-sauce Teslas out of the water. It is not close, and it not debatable.
Behold: cheap, luxurious electric cars that have been effectively banned from the U.S.
China is roughly ten years ahead of the rest of world in virtually every aspect of clean energy technology development. And with the Trump administration pulling the plug on Biden's clean energy funding, that's not going to change anytime soon. We were just starting to gain some momentum, too. But now, proposed American EV and battery-manufacturing plants are being shuttered left and right.
What that means is we're gonna buy a lot of batteries from our frenemies across the sea. More batteries than you can possibly imagine. And they're gonna need to be incredibly cheap, energy dense, and safe enough to store in our homes.
Thankfully, they already are.
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