Can Solar & Wind Fix Everything (e.g., Climate Change) with a battery break-through?

Honestly, I think the tech is closer than people realise, but the grid-scale storage problem is still massive. My little Fogstar 200Ah LiFePO4 setup for the garden office is brilliant, but scaling that thinking up to national grids is a whole different beast.

The sodium-ion stuff coming out of China looks promising — cheaper materials, no lithium dependency. And there's been some interesting noise around iron-air batteries for long-duration storage. Neither are there yet though.

Solar and wind together could genuinely cover the generation side if we sort the intermittency issue. The UK's wind resource alone is enormous — we're sitting on a goldmine. Pair that with a proper storage breakthrough and yeah, I can see a path.

But "fix climate change"? That's where I'd pump the brakes a bit. Energy is maybe 70-75% of global emissions? The rest is agriculture, land use, cement, industrial processes... batteries don't touch most of that.

So optimistic-ish, but not naively so. The battery breakthrough would be a huge piece, not the whole puzzle.

Anyone following the solid-state stuff from Toyota? Curious whether that's actually going to land or stay vaporware for another decade. Also wondering if Victron or similar will start supporting newer chemistries properly when they do arrive — would hate to need a full system rip-out.

Davo | Senior Member

@MeganFox Totally get the enthusiasm - there's something genuinely exciting about watching the tech mature. Your Fogstar setup is a great example of where LiFePO4 has landed for small-scale stuff.

The grid-scale challenge is a different beast entirely though. Even if battery costs halved tomorrow, you're still looking at seasonal storage problems - what do you do in a UK January when you've had a fortnight of overcast, calm weather? That's where pumped hydro, green hydrogen, or flow batteries might actually outshine lithium chemistry.

I'd say solar and wind are already doing a lot of heavy lifting on emissions, battery breakthrough or not. The grid storage gap is real but perhaps overstated as a blocker - demand-side management and interconnectors are quietly doing serious work already.

VivaroWanderer | Member

@MeganFox The grid-scale jump is genuinely the hard part — my Vivaro runs a 400Ah Fogstar bank with a Victron MultiPlus, and even that felt like serious engineering to get right. Scaling to national grid levels isn't just "more batteries," it's entirely different chemistry, thermal management, and round-trip efficiency conversations.

Vanadium flow batteries and iron-air tech are probably more realistic for grid storage than lithium ever will be — different use-case entirely. Lithium wins on energy density; grid storage wins on cycle life and raw capacity.

What gives me genuine optimism though is that the economics are shifting faster than the technology. When grid-scale storage becomes cheaper than peaker gas plants — and we're approaching that crossover — the investment follows automatically. The breakthrough might be financial rather than chemical.

Your Fogstar setup is basically proof-of-concept at micro scale — the principles are sound.

RayWatson81 | Senior Member

@MeganFox The leap from your garden office to grid-scale isn't just "more batteries" — it's an entirely different engineering problem. Cycle life, thermal management, supply chains, recycling infrastructure... none of it scales linearly.

That said, flow batteries (vanadium, iron-air) are genuinely interesting for grid storage. Different chemistry to your Fogstar LiFePO4, no degradation over thousands of cycles.

From my boat setup — 400Ah Victron/Fogstar with a wind turbine supplementing solar — I've learned that storage paired with diverse generation is what actually works. Solar-only has gaps. Wind fills some of them. Grid-scale needs that same logic: mixed renewables plus storage, not one magic bullet.

Battery breakthroughs help but they're not the whole answer. Grid topology, demand management, and interconnection matter just as much. Anyone betting everything on a single tech fix is going to be disappointed.

Curly38 | Member

@MeganFox Grid-scale storage is genuinely the bottleneck but a "battery breakthrough" gets bandied about every six months like it's about to land next Tuesday. It never does.

My cabin runs Victron + Fogstar and it's brilliant for what it is — but that's 400Ah serving me. The maths when you scale to national demand is eye-watering stuff.

Worth remembering storage is only half the puzzle anyway. Grid infrastructure, planning permission nightmares, and the sheer materials cost of lithium at scale are all queued up waiting to be the next problem.

Not saying it's impossible — just that "battery breakthrough fixes climate change" is doing a lot of heavy lifting as a sentence. Incremental boring progress is probably more likely than one magic moment. Less exciting, more realistic.

JackeryNerd | Member

@MeganFox Same boat here — garden office on a Victron/Fogstar setup and it's genuinely transformed how I work. But I'd push back on the "breakthrough is close" optimism a bit.

The chemistry improvements are incremental, not revolutionary. Solid-state has been "18 months away" for a decade now. What actually changes the equation isn't necessarily energy density — it's cycle life and cost per kWh at scale.

Flow batteries and gravity storage don't get the headlines but they're arguably more realistic for grid applications than trying to upscale lithium.

The climate angle is also complicated — mining lithium and cobalt has its own environmental footprint that rarely gets factored into the "solar fixes everything" narrative.

Not saying it can't happen, just that the path from your 200Ah Fogstar to replacing gas peaker plants is a lot messier than the optimists suggest.