Nuclear Monitor #932
Jan van Evert
The most used argument used by pro nuclear lobbyists and politicians is that we need a stable ‘base-load’ to compensate the fluctuating output of solar and wind power. Another often heard problem is the German word ‘Dunkelflaute’: a period during winter when there is a lack of solar and wind power. According to Jan Vos, chairman of the NWEA (Dutch wind energy association), this is often highly exaggerated. Co-author of the Adequacy Outlook Koen Gorrissen says: “on average this problem occurs six hours per year”. And these problems can soon be moved to the history books: battery prices are falling rapidly resulting in a rapid expansion of installed battery capacity worldwide.
In Australia utility scale batteries are now injecting about 1 gigawatt (GW) electrical power on average every day at peak output, and by definition charging a bit more. But we ain’t seen nothing yet: In about two years time, there will be around 16 GW of capacity that will be operating. Worldwide battery deployment nearly doubles every year. In 2024, developers deployed over 160 gigawatt-hours of new battery storage, which is nearly as much in one year as in all recorded history. The manufacturing capacity is already being put in place: global battery production is on track to reach twice even the most ambitious (net zero) International Energy Agency forecasts by 2030.
As deployment scales, costs continue to fall; by as much as forty percent last year. Battery storage quality has improved dramatically as well – with near “plug and-play” grid systems cutting installation time and cost, longer lifetimes (some warrantied for as much as 20 years), and minimal fire risk, Seen through the lens of past storage revolutions, one thing becomes clear: forecasts almost certainly underestimate how large electricity storage will become. Most energy outlooks tend to only model the bare minimum needed to balance grids; typically 30 to 40 TWh globally in the long term. As battery costs fall, they will appear everywhere: not only at solar farms and substations, but also in businesses and homes. This will help to stabilise the power grid.
The latest development is the rise of sodium-ion batteries (SIBs). They have many advantages such as the fact that they use no critical minerals like lithium. Cobalt, copper, and nickel are not required for many types of sodium-ion batteries. Theoretically, sodium battery costs should be much lower than lithium’s. However, as of 2025, due to the lack of large-scale production, the price of sodium-ion batteries is roughly the same as that of lithium-ion cells. But that could soon change. In the coming years, as sodium battery production scales up, the cost is expected to halve – the same price level as lithium batteries. CATL, the world’s biggest lithium-ion battery manufacturer, announced in 2022 the start of mass production of SIBs. The French company Tiamat announced earlier this year that it has started construction of a SIB factory in France that will start production in 2027. It is a pilot project with a production capacity of several million batteries per year.
An even newer system has been developed by the Finnish company Polar Night Energy. They have built and operate the world’s first commercial sand battery. It converts excess electrical power into heat that is stored in a large container filled with sand. A simple and cheap system that supplies this heat to the district heating network in the winter. The first sand battery is an about four meters wide and seven meters high steel container that has a patented and automated heat storage system and about a hundred tons of sand inside. It has been in operation since 2022 and has a capacity of 8 MWh. The company has also started a ‘Sand to Power Pilot’ that will be able to convert the stored heat back into electricity. Construction will be finished in 2026 and commercial-scale projects are expected to start the year after.
Sources:
Wikipedia
