20gwh is a nice start of course but like the solar growth is impressive, battery production capacity growth is also impressive. And of course there are many other forms of storage. I'm bringing this up because people seem to worry about intermittency of solar and wind without realizing just how much battery capacity there actually will be in a few years.
I think we can safely expect some records to be broken on the battery storage front in the next few years. Think orders of magnitude here. About three or so in terms of storage capacity. A a couple of thousand x what we have today.
Basically, the likes of Tesla and other manufacturers are really ramping up battery production in the next few years. If you assume EVs have 50kwh batteries (nice number to work with), 2 million cars would have 100,000,000 kwh of battery. Or 100 gwh, or 0.1 twh. That's what they are shooting for end of this year as a production volume. Tesla is aiming for 10-20 million cars per year longer term and the total market is something like 100m vehicles, give or take. 20 million cars is 1 twh. So, we'll be churning out ~5 twh of battery per year; just for cars. Eventually there will be hundreds of millions of EVs on the road. That's an enormous amount of batteries. And of course there will be other vehicles, dedicated grid storage solutions, etc.
Total installed battery capacity world wide will soon hit tens of twh. To give you an idea of just how much that is, annual energy production globally is in the order of 25 peta watt hours (25000 twh). Or about 70twh per day.
The volume of EVs on the road in a few decades will have enough battery capacity to provide that for several days. And of course a lot of car batteries get a second life in the form of grid storage before they eventually get recycled. Car batteries are good for a few thousand cycles. So, for people worrying about durability, once we have tens of twh of batteries, they might be used for decades to power the world before they need replacing. And we'll use solar and other cheap energy sources to keep them topped up.
