When I first read the titile, I thought that the US is going to have to build A LOT to triple global production. Then it occured to me that the author means the US is pledging to make deals and agreements which enable other countries to build their own. Sometimes I think the US thinks too much of itself and that’s also very much part of American branding.
Where are my renewable bros at? Tell me this is bad.
If people like you, that seemingly don’t have a good grasp of physics, are the people driving governance and policy of energy, then it’s no wonder most of the world doesn’t have a cohesive energy plan besides burn more fossil fuels. You lead with “market modeling” which operates on constraints that aren’t useful for a society, only for arbitrage, so finding local maximums within that market would absolutely lead you to believe that subsidized renewables are the best ROI, since you aren’t really examining the whole picture. After all you aren’t paid to actually examine or understand the energy problem, only to extract value from the current market conditions.
To wit: The examples of energy storage you have given completely ignore the primary value of a battery, energy density. Energy density is the number one most important aspect of storage because if you don’t optimize the energy density problem, you literally cannot scale your energy storage solution. For example, lithium batteries are pretty good for energy density, not as good as gasoline, but they were a huge breakthrough when they were invented, and they are the reason we have cell phones and electric vehicles. They are ~10x better then previous gen batteries.
This is something that needs to be understood before any examination about the feasibility of “storage” is ever discussed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density
The important points are these:
The meaning of those above points is that any other battery you bring up (pumped storage, compressed air, etc etc) requires at least an order of magnitude larger in size then the best technology we have today. You need 10x liters of Lithium Ion batteries to store the energy of 1 liter of gas. And remember lithium ion is the most economical we have so far. And it isn’t actually viable for storing anything compared to the amount of output a single wind turbine can provide. Let alone a nuclear reactor.
It would take around 3trillion liters of lithium ion batteries to store a years worth of power from a single wind turbine or around 8million/L for a single days worth of energy. We cannot actually build that. We don’t have enough lithium on earth to do that. So I stand by my initial claim. You want magic batteries, I want to build nuclear reactors that can actually exist.
There are very different constraints on something portable, like a phone, laptop, car, or even plane, compared with something like an electricity grid.
You need to have high energy density for cars, planes, and phones. You don’t need high energy density for a grid. What’s more important there is scalability and reliability.