14
votes
Do we really need all these long-duration energy storage (LDES) technologies to hit the net-zero target?
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- Energy Storage, But Make It Complicated
- Authors
- Engineering with Rosie
- Duration
- 20:05
- Published
- Dec 24 2025
It might not be as costly, difficult, or time consuming to put up grid storage as expected. Grid-Scale Bubble Batteries Will Soon Be Everywhere, apparently a story of sufficient merit for IEEE Spectrum to report on it.
Comment box
Rosie Barnes discusses long-duration energy storage (LDES) systems to pair with variable renewable generation. She identifies the ones with the most economic potential.
Three takeaways:
Most of the global population and most energy generation occurs in regions that are naturally highly suitable for solar. This means global long-term storage needs are low. The exception is population centers in Northern Europe, but even these places probably won’t need as much LDES as people think.
I agree with Barnes’ hot take that we shouldn’t be directing significant scientific and financial resources toward LDES until we actually need to. It’s more efficient to focus on issues with greater urgency and ROI, like getting solar+wind to 85% of generating capacity to being with. Then LDES becomes more financially prudent to invest in. By that point, shorter-term systems will have improved and may capture market segments from longer-term ones; this means we avoid wasting investing into overbuilt infrastructure.
I recently shared an article about the EU’s grid permitting legislation. Grid operators failing to efficiently process new interconnections is the biggest bottleneck to the energy transition in many places. This can be resolved through legislation. Additional funding for grid upgrades is also necessary.
Barnes didn’t discuss one nascent technology that supersedes storage needs—next-generation geothermal. This is illegal in some places (like the UK) due to outdated regulations, but is safe and effective. It’s also continuous, unlike variable renewables.
In the next 25 years, next-gen geothermal could reach 15% of electricity generation capacity. If solar and wind cover most of the remaining 85%, there’s very little need for energy storage at all. Some will always be necessary, but I would personally say that investing into geothermal is likely to be one of the most cost-effective methods to accelerate the energy transition.
Perhaps solar + battery storage will become so ridiculously cheap that that it isn’t necessary, but I think it’ll have a place.
I'm going to keep my response to this short because it will inevitably just get me worked up again, and I don't want that, but this is entirely true.
The people of the Netherlands have been nudged and prodded and incentivised to invest into solar power, to the point we now have a higher percentage of personal consumer solar panels on rooftops than Spain.
Truthfully, the subsidy of allowing people to write off energy cost from what they generate 1:1 is not a good way to do this (it mostly ended up being rich early adopters to really benefit from this), but that's neither here nor there. The result is that we have plenty of solar.
A result we saw coming for at least a decade. And a result our grid operators have done nothing about to accommodate.
In fact, our energy companies and operators are now forcing consumers to pay them for every kWh generated over a certain level in order not to strain the grid. A grid they should have been preparing to handle this excess load. "Terugleverheffing" they call it.
I recently received a letter asking if I wanted to install an app to see when the grid is/isn't as strained so I could turn on/off my solar panels.
This, in my opinion, is shifting the blame, cost, effort, and everything else to the consumer that was heavily incentivised to invest in solar in the first place, and punishes them.
And still, as far as I can tell there are no real plans to solidify the grid to future proof the system.
As they announced the cancellation of the subsidy -and without stopping the grid operators from fleecing customers- the solar panel market instantly cratered. Taking personal responsibility in the energy transition is now punished for the foreseeable future.
I'm not sure I follow. It sounds like you're saying that the Netherlands doesn't need any more rooftop solar, but installing it should still be subsidized? But why would that make sense?
No, the government subsidies have to stop. There is a long list of reasons why this method of subsidy is problematic.
What annoys me is that after promoting sustainability and encouraging people to install their own solar using said government subsidy, grid operators and energy companies are now penalizing people for generating too much electricity.
They saw the oversaturation problem coming yet did nothing to clean it up.
That isn't exactly how science works though. Without the dozens of decades that have been put into R&D for nuclear power plants, we'd still be at 1960's level of performance and safety.
Above those key latitudes, solar generation is extremely excessive in the summer and extremely under in the winter. I'm not even that far north (southern New Jersey), have a fully electrified home, and while my summer months drive my power bill down negative or into single digit bills, the combo of days or weeks without direct sunlight and short days means my electric bill can top $800 in the coldest of winter. Adding capacity would help with my personal costs, other than laws about capacity limits.
But that does not address the systemic cost of electrical generation in winter...particularly in parts of the USA that are still primarily heated with natural gas or oil. Wider deployment of wind power will help, but is not really feasible in denser urban areas, and the NIMBYs will do their damndest to keep it out of the suburbs.
We're going to need Hoover Dam scale infrastructure projects to deploy things like pumped hydro storage......and those things can take decades to get live. If we project needing them by 2045, we should start picking sites and building them today.
I'm reminded of the worst case of arguing EV conversion to nutjobs: Even if climate change isn't real, the worst case is lower pollution. Is that so bad? It does tend to short circuit the Fox News talking points.
Worst case here we have another artificial lake which would help mitigate flooding and droughts.
Comment box
Well sure, I agree with the principle of long-term research. Barnes’ argument is that we just don’t need to focus on LDES-that we can either:
She’s not saying don’t research LDES at all, just not to frontload it as a central/urgent part of energy transition strategy,because there are more pressing issues.
My additional claim is that geothermal can cover enough base load generation capacity to handle New Jersey’s winter energy needs more directly than LDES, which is not generative. Every conversion into/out of storage has efficiency losses. So if we’re going to do the long-term research and infrastructure build-outs on anything, it should be geothermal. (And there are also side benefits to grid stability?) I think it’s better to have a lot of scalable base load generation capacity and little storage than the other way around.
As for civil infrastructure, I would say the decade-plus timelines of pumped hydro are an incentive to minimize reliance on those systems, from a resource allocation/planning perspective. Not to get into the negative environmental impacts of dams.
I can’t speak as much on the other solutions. If I were to focus on any of them, it would probably be the iron-air batteries, or other battery technology beyond Li-ion. I think this is easier to implement than pumped hydro.
The reason I’m okay with the “85% approach” is that the earth has a natural carbon sink which can handle some emissions. (While AI will increase electricity use overall, I believe it has a mostly flat pattern, so it doesn’t exacerbate residential peaks.) The urgency for the remaining 15% is comparatively low. I think this is a good strategy for most technical problems.
That makes sense, there’s a clear use-case for energy storage.
I think this is illustrative of broader societal incentives regarding energy research though. People are drawn to solutions that resolve (or appear to resolve) immediate personal problems, but usually ignore carbon externalities, because…. How would you even budget for that? They’re still real, and big, but…. mysterious. And severity of personal problems might, or might not, align with severity of overall problems.
This means it’s hard to develop a planning framework that sequences development in a way that solves the underlying problem efficiently. It’s also really hard to predict how technologies will be economically competitive in the future, which is what Barnes says happened to a lot of LDES tech in the last decade—Li-ion batteries caught up, so a lot of the specialized market-fit engineering they did is for naught.
I think we can and should work on solving multiple problems simultaneously though.
The original topic title was super clickbaity, so I replaced it with the first sentence of the video description.
/offtopic