Hope for Jaded Green Investors
For several years, people I would not usually consider religious have displayed a simple, childlike faith in electric batteries, and miraculous battery “breakthroughs” that would make a green economy possible. The breakthrough batteries would redeem the European auto industry after the shame of Dieselgate. They would store wind and solar power so cheaply that fossil fuel would die of embarrassment and bankruptcy. Oil and gas owned by oligarchs and Trump voters would be left in the ground.
Time, calculation, map-consulting and reflection have created some doubts about the all-electric renewable economy. To begin with, replacing fossil fuel by moving renewables-generated energy around the electricity grid and using it to power vehicles has some inherent problems. You would use an awful lot of metals such as copper, nickel and cobalt that need to be mined on a much larger scale, with long-term commitments, at great expense. The metals would often come from places with, let us say, governance issues.
Lithium ion batteries have been great for low-powered consumer products, but further improvements in their energy density, efficiency and safety are coming more slowly as the technology has been tweaked, re-tweaked and matured. Their short discharge times and relatively limited useful lives reduce their utility for grid storage or powering vehicles.
Also, in jumping to a renewables-wires-batteries economy you would be junking a huge amount of industrial and transport assets built up over the decades based on the assumption there would be liquid or gaseous fuel to burn. If there were some way to repurpose that plant in a climate-friendly manner, that would be easier than rebuilding advanced economies from scratch, no?
Storing energy
That is why some energy technology people and strategic investors are fiddling with liquid organic hydrogen carriers (LOHCs).