Batteries Change Everything
Craig Dalzell
In 2019 Common Weal embarked upon and published our Common Home Plan – the world’s first (and still only) fully comprehensive and fully costed national-scale Green New Deal plan. It was, at the time, a £170 billion, 25 year project that would not just eliminate Scotland’s contribution to climate change but would reverse the historic damage we’ve caused (“Net Zero” plans merely promise to keep polluting up until a certain date and then to keep polluting beyond that date but to fix the damage caused as they go) and would fundamentally change other damaging aspects of our society beyond carbon emissions such as soil depletion, resource misuse, non-carbon pollution and the social costs of things like fuel poverty, income inequality and consumer capitalism (“Net Zero” plans are based on the assumption that you’ll still have to buy far too much crap and in ever increasing amounts, but you’ll recycle your waste more…or else…).
Our plan was ignored by the Scottish Government despite widespread acclaim from environmental groups and experts in the various fields covered by it. Five years later – 20% of the way through the plan’s timeline – the Government continues to miss legal environmental obligations despite dropping many of them.
Of course, no plan survives first contact intact and in late 2019 we couldn’t have predicted a global pandemic would be upon us the following year, major wars after that and the effects of monopolistic energy companies and how all three would affect global supply chains (though we did base our plan on the likelihood that global supply chains WOULD be disrupted and sought to insulate Scotland from them). And so it’s probably worth dipping back into elements of our plan to see how things have changed, especially in light of some recent articles I’ve been reading this week on one key area of the energy sector – battery storage.
In 2019, we were fairly conservative on battery storage. It was still an emerging market and we recognised the severe material and environmental limits in things like lithium mining (Scotland doesn’t have much lithium and the mining process is locally very destructive). Our energy plan was also based around Scotland only becoming independent part way through the transition process so the limits of devolution around energy supply would apply in the strategic and planning phase. We therefore sought to minimise (though not eliminate) grid-scale batteries. Most of Scotland’s energy storage in OCH comes in the form of HEAT storage such as the inter-seasonal stores then-planned, now being demonstrated in Denmark.
We instead reserved most of our battery usage for transport and it’s there that we made our biggest “error” in our projections. In 2019, the technological pathway for non-fossil fuel transport was finely balanced. For smaller vehicles (van-sized or smaller), it was obvious that battery-EV was the way to go. For larger vehicles (buses, trucks, ferries etc), we thought that we’d need a green hydrogen infrastructure to fuel them. As it has turned out, the rise of the battery sector has proved hydrogen trucks to be the Betamax solution of that particular format war (or HD DVD if you’re in your 30s….or physical media discs entirely if you’re in your 20s…). Hydrogen trucks work…but for journeys of less than 1,000km a battery powered truck is cheaper than a hydrogen truck and likely to remain so beyond the scope of the Common Home Plan. In the Scottish context where we don’t have a trans-Siberian or trans-Canadian highway to contend with, that’s fine.
Our remaining electricity budget (i.e. everything we weren’t able to shunt into heat or efficiency savings) comes mostly from wind and solar and our numbers there have proved to be relatively robust. No-one, not even the experts who said that everyone was being too conservative on the growth potential of the solar sector, managed to accurately predict the explosion of the solar sector and the drop in costs involved. Solar PV panels aren’t quite yet “too cheap to meter” but they’re very nearly so cheap that it’s not worth NOT installing them on every surface that can carry a panel even if it’s facing the “wrong way”. Taking the “everyone is too conservative” advice, we chose the lower limits of the projections for our cost modelling and our prediction in 2019 was that by 2025 large scale solar arrays would cost around £47 per MWh. The cost in Europe today – after a pandemic, war and energy crisis – is around £53 per MWh (which in 2019 prices is equivalent to £44 per MWh compared to our £47/MWh).
A couple of months ago, Auke Hoekstra – the energy expert I linked to above – published this fascinating article on the progress of battery technology and has predicted that by 2030 static batteries (i.e. in your home or in large scale storage plants, but not in your vehicles) could drop from their current price of around €200/MWh to as low as €50/MWh (In 2019, we worked to a battery price of around €300 per MWh which has obviously proved to be substantially too high but shows why then best thinking on transport strategy was so finely balanced). The main driver for this is “experience” – basically, production gets more efficient as more people build more of them and get better at it and get better at refining designs – but the things that take us below previously predicted price floors are new technologies. In this case, the potential for a sodium battery replacing the near ubiquitous lithium battery. Sodium doesn’t make as efficient a battery as lithium does so you need a larger battery to store the same amount of energy. This is a big drawback in things like cars but less of an issue for a home battery system in a cupboard or an array of batteries in shipping crates in the back end of a brownfield site somewhere. Critically, compared to lithium, sodium is both cheap and EVERYWHERE. Scotland has plenty of sea to extra salt from. We could become a sodium battery powerhouse if we wanted to.
The thinking around not just price but on material limits was one of the core differences between our Common Home Plan and the Government’s “Net Zero” plan and this brings us to the second article I read this week by Cory Doctorow that posits that the very idea of a Green transition is anathema to growth-based capitalism and explains why those who benefit from the current system are putting up so much resistance to that transition. The “problem” with a renewables+battery future compared to the current fossil fuel extraction system is just how mind-blowingly efficient it is in terms of material use. Climate Change deniers like to point out the amount of materials involved in making a battery but Doctorow points out that the total amount of materials required to permanently meet the energy needs of everyone on the planet (i.e. to give everyone access to enough solar+wind+batteries to meet their energy needs) would require around 125 million tons of materials…which is around 1/17th of the amount of materials extracted and (largely) burned to sustain the fossil fuel economy in a single year.
Consider for a moment what that looks like to an oil company shareholder who is looking at those numbers and at the vast amounts of capital they've sunk into their operations and are being told that a green transition would mean an end to all of their mining operations AND the loss of all of their customers (the world already produces enough biofuels to sustain all of the non-fuel uses for oil if only we stopped burning it). This is currently being framed as a threat to miners and oil worker jobs but they’ll have plenty of work if we listen to their ideas for a Just Transition. The real threat to jobs is to the jobs of the executives at the top who know that we simply won’t need all of them to “manage” the lack of oil companies in that new world and if we remove the need for extraction of materials, we also remove their ability to extract profits as they do it.
And those oil barons do survive the transition AND they manage to keep the growth-based economy flowing, then even as the economy grows they’ll have to do almost nothing to keep up. (and if we do move to a non-growth wellbeing economy, they’ll have even less to do). Throw in only modest improvements to already effective battery recycling technology and we’ll almost never need to mine anything again. We underestimate the power of that recycling. A lithium battery lasts around ten years and can be recycling with 94% efficiency. Even assuming no further improvements to recycling, if we mine enough materials to make ten batteries today and recycle them at end of use, then by the time we don’t have enough recycled materials to make a single whole battery, we find that we’ve made not ten but 124 batteries across 380 years of manufacturing. Lithium mined today could still be being used in a battery in the year 2400. The people of that time will wonder how we survived in a world that was so wasteful (the answer, of course, being that we almost didn’t…we trashed the place really badly).
But it needn’t be this way. We hope that you’ll help us to continue to campaign for the Scottish Government to recognise that they are missing the boat of the opportunities of the Green New Deal and to adopt our Common Home Plan (even if it means a now accelerated timescale because we’re starting so late). We won’t need to wait till 2400 to see the benefits and by the time we do, we’ll wonder what took us so long to get there.