Posted on 03/28/2022 5:24:12 AM PDT by MtnClimber
If you are even a semi-regular reader of this blog, you know about the energy storage problem that is inherent in the effort to eliminate dispatchable fossil fuels from the electricity generation system and replace them with wind and solar. As discussed here many times, other than with nuclear power, the storage problem is the critical issue that must be addressed if there is ever going to be “net zero” electricity generation, let alone a “net zero” economy based on all energy usage having been electrified. For a sample of my prior posts on this subject just in the last few months, go here, here and here.
The problems of trying to provide enough storage to back up a fully wind and solar system without fossil fuels are so huge and so costly that you would think that everyone pushing the “net zero” agenda would be completely focused on these issues. And given that the issues are quite obvious, you would think that such people would be well down the curve with feasibility studies, cost studies, and demonstration projects to make their case on how their plans could be accomplished. Remarkably, that is not the case at all. Instead, if you read about the plans and proposals in various quarters for “net zero” in some short period of years, you quickly realize that the people pushing this agenda have no clue. No clue whatsoever.
Today, I am going to look at discussions of the storage situation coming out of three jurisdictions with ambitious “net zero” plans: California, Australia and New York. First a very brief summary of the problem. It is (or certainly should be) obvious that wind and solar generators have substantial periods when they generate nothing (e.g., calm nights), and other times when they generate far less than users demand. Get out a spreadsheet to do some calculations based on actual historical patterns of usage and generation from wind and solar sources, and you will find that to have a fully wind/solar generation system and make it through a year without a catastrophic failure, you will need approximately a three-times overbuild (based on rated capacity) of the wind/solar system, plus storage for something in the range of 24 - 30 days of average usage. For these purposes “usage” at any given moment is measured in gigawatts, but usage for some period of time is measured in gigawatt hours, not gigawatts. California’s average electricity usage for 2020 was about 31 GW; Australia’s was about 26 GW ; and New York’s was about 18 GW.
To calculate how much storage you need in gigawatt hours, multiply average usage in GW by 30 days and 24 hours per day. So California will need about 22,302 GWH of storage, Australia about 18,720 GWH, and New York about 12,960 GWH. That is to supply current levels of demand. For the “everything electrified” case, triple all of these numbers: 66,906 GWH for California, 56,160 GWH for Australia, and 38,880 GWH for New York. Price that out at current costs of Tesla-type lithium-ion batters (~$150/KWH) and you will get around $10 trillion for California, $8.4 trillion for Australia, and $5.8 trillion for New York. These figures are in the range of triple total annual GDP for each of these jurisdictions, before you even get to the cost of the three-times overbuild of the generations system to account for charging of the batteries when the sun is shining and wind blowing. Nor can Tesla-style batteries hold charge for months on end as would be necessary for this system, but at this point, that seems like a minor quibble.
With that, let’s consider some recent discussion of the march toward “net zero” in each of these jurisdictions:
California. On March 14, PV Magazine (I think that stands for “Photo Voltaic”) had a piece by Christian Roselund with the title “California’s solar market is now a battery market.” The gist is that California’s solar developers have now caught on to the need to pair batteries with their projects, and that therefore new projects going forward are as much battery projects as solar panel projects. Here’s a sample of the cheerleading:
No US state has led the energy transition like California has. . . . As a result California has been a pioneer for a range of clean energy technologies. . . . California is on the cusp of no longer being a solar market where batteries are being added – instead, it is becoming a battery market that (sometimes) includes solar.
So how much battery capacity is being added by the new projects?:
According to the American Clean Power Association, California had only 256MW of utility-scale batteries before 2020, but had reached 2.1GW by the end of 2021 – an eightfold increase. . . . The 256 solar-plus-storage projects representing 72GW of solar and 64GW of batteries make up the vast majority of hybrid projects in the CAISO queue. . . . California will need all the energy storage it can get its hands on; a recent analysis suggests that the state needs 37GW of batteries over the next 20 years, as well as 53.2GW of utility-scale solar.
It’s all GW, GW, GW. But guys, how about the amount of GWH that California will need? You will not find any mention of that unit in this piece. Sorry, but if those 64 GW of batteries you are planning to buy only store energy for one hour, then you will need to multiply your purchase by about a factor of a thousand. If they store energy for about four hours (typical of what you might be able to buy today), then multiply your purchase by a factor of 250.
Could they really be so far off from the actual problem? I’m afraid that the answer is yes.
Australia. Over in Australia, it appears that they have people who have figured out that they need to measure the storage requirements for wind/solar backup in GWH rather than GW. Here is a piece from March 25 from Energy Storage News, headline “Australia surpassed 1GWh of annual battery storage deployments during 2021.” That’s huge progress. But one GWH?
Read the article, and again it’s all cheerleading for the great progress being made:
[F]or Victoria it was a record-breaking year, while NSW has already recorded strong installation volumes and its tally of 7,377 installations was in line with figures in recent years. . . . Victoria hosts a 48% share of the commercial and grid-scale operating capacity today, with South Australia the next biggest at 24%, Queensland on 14% and NSW on 9%. Last year, the Victorian Big Battery came online, which at 300MW/450MWh made a big contribution to the state’s total.
And how much is in the pipeline?:
There is around 1,000MWh of grid-scale energy storage currently under construction, but the development pipeline of projects is a massive 57GWh.
“A massive” 57 GWH. Really? Has anyone told them that they are going to need more like 56,160 GWH to fulfill their “net zero” fantasies? Like California, they are off by about a factor of 1000. Here is a picture from the article of what a Tesla-type battery installation for a mere 150 MWH looks like. That’s well less than 1/6 of one GWH.
Looks like they’re going to need 400,000 +/- of these installations. And by the way, these Tesla-style batteries have no ability to store energy without loss for months on end. Good luck trying to find anyone addressing these issues.
New York. In crazy New York, we have a statute passed in 2019 that requires state-wide greenhouse gas emissions to be cut to 60% of 1990 levels by 2030. Since electricity is less than 1/3 of final energy consumption, this would necessarily mean that all fossil fuel electricity generation will be gone in 8 years.
How to do that? A collection of panels and advisory bodies have been putting out reams of reports, thousands of pages in the aggregate. Nobody could possibly keep up. On the other hand, it is obvious that essentially no batteries are yet under construction.
A lone guy named Roger Caiazza, who blogs as the Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York, is the only critical thinker I am aware of who tries to read most of this stuff. On March 25 Caiazza had a post titled “What the Experts Are Saying Now.” That post was also picked up at Watts Up With That here.
Here’s Caiazza’s big discovery. Rather than proposing a massive build of batteries, New York’s “experts” think they have a better idea: the “DEFR”. That stands for “Dispatchable Emissions Free Resource.” And what exactly is that? As far as Caiazza can determine, it’s something that hasn’t been invented yet. Caiazza links to this March 24 Report from New York’s Independent System Operator, title “System and Resource Outlook Update.” Plow your way through through 17 pages of incomprehensible gibberish and you will come to this on page 18:
DEFR Builds Allowed Starting in 2030
Input Assumption Adjusted: – First allowable year for DEFR builds advanced to 2030
• Caveats:
– Significant uncertainty related to cost / availability of DEFR technologies, as well as regulatory definition of “zero-emissions” compliant technologies
– Assumption is not based on estimate of realistic timeline for first potential DEFR additions
Observations:
– DEFR capacity build earlier on in model horizon,
although comparable capacity builds by 2040
– Decreased fossil capacity (i.e., primarily earlier retirements and less new builds) offset by earlier DEFR capacity additions
Yes, we are to be completely dependent on so-called “DEFR” technologies, which have not been invented yet and as to which “significant uncertainties” exist. Could this get any more ridiculous?
I guess if you work at the ISO and open your mouth and say “this can’t possibly work,” you will be immediately fired. And so we plow forward with religious zeal, until one day we hit the wall.
Thanks, and nice write-up! I like that you’re not the condescending type (like the Tesla owners here) telling people they need to leave the past behind, and move on to the future, where everything will be electric (including their dog, I guess).
I also saw the pricing on the PowerWall...but I’m sure they’re better looking than your ex is now. But it does make sense what you’re doing. But to be completely off the grid, and still use electricity normally in bad days in winter, you’d likely need what they say...around 1000 hours of storage, which I would estimate at around 500 kWh (at least for me if I lived there in a modest house)...EXPENSIVE! Now go North where heat pumps don’t work and the sun don’t shine much in winter...probably 3 times that storage.
For me the win I want is for the energy portion of my budget to be what it was like in 2019 (not counting 2020 as a "normal" year). That was $188/month for power + $125/month for natural gas + $150/month for gas to drive 200 miles per week (in an old used pickup truck, not counting both cars of driving then since we'll replace only 1 gas car with an EV and now my wife and I don't drive as much as we move into quasi-retirement). If I can make it so that my power bill + HELOC payment (how I'm buying the solar system both the old one and the upgrade) is equal to or less than $460/month while still driving 200 miles per week, then I'm basically beating energy inflation. And that's energy inflation caused by the Dims that most Tesla lovers worship the feet of.
If I had my way I'd drill and process my own natural gas because that's a lot more efficient and dependable than solar. But I can't -- I have to depend on local and federal gubment workers for natural gas. That's what solar is to me -- literally putting the power back into my control.
By the way, the EV's that caught mine and my wife's attentions are Fords, not Teslas. LOL
“By the way, the EV’s that caught mine and my wife’s attentions are Fords, not Teslas. LOL”
Good to hear, that likely explains your reasonable attitude.
“One of the real problems here is that I don’t think that people understand...”
Oh, they do. The people at the top understand it PERFECTLY. Don’t let trick you into thinking they’re dumb and therefore just need to be ‘educated in facts’, since that implies they’d be willing to change plans.
They know the facts...and their plans aren’t changing.
Great observation. There's a core reason for that. The single axiom of science is to question everything, and be prepared to prove everything from scratch at any time--and change your assumptions when they're shown to be incorrect.
We can only detect phenomena--we can only "see" what can be seen at this moment using whatever measuring tools we have chosen.
A scientist is a man in the daily business of not trusting the science.
The problem with wind and solar is that they a too dilute and too intermittent to actually supply continuous electrical energy. Nuclear is the real solution but progress is being blocked by the NNRA and other regulatory agencies that are stuck in the technology era of Light Water Reactors (LWR) that require solid fuel and cooling using high pressure water that must be actively pumped to prevent a meltdown.
The smartest man in America today is Ed Pfeil who is the founder and CEO of Elysium Industries. His 50 years of building every kind of nuclear reactor for the Navy has led him to a design for a liquid chloride salt (melted table salt) fast breeder reactor. His design not only generates its own fuel for a hundred years but safely burns denatured weapons grade plutonium that is currently laying around at the Savannah River processing plant in South Carolina.
The waste products for this reactor decay much faster than current LWR reactors and would be down to background levels in 100 years. This is because they keep all the long decay stuff in the liquid salt fuel and split it off as “starter fuel” to newer reactors kind of like making sourdough bread.
The whole reactor has been designed to address the specific problems of scalability, proliferation, and cost reduction that Pfeil had to face over his long career. He has been working with planners in Ohio to build a demonstration version, but his goal is to convince Tim Scot and Linsay Graham to get the Savannah River plutonium burner built in time to keep the US in compliance with its treaty with Russia to dispose of weapons grade plutonium. This is such a win-win it for the greenies and energy consumers you would think it would be a slam dunk.
I've read fairly recently that petroleum is a mineral product arising from geological forces in the earth's crust--that it's not dinosaurs and old trees.
The only way a “no-emissions” scheme could actually work is with nuclear power. And then, it would have to be a “low-emissions” scheme, since nuclear, followed by wind, solar and hydropower, charging electric vehicles, would likely not be feasible everywhere. I’m just trying to account for REALITY here. Then, ideally, you would have natural gas for further power production, followed by oil and coal as a backup.
But again, even that would be central planning, and would likely be prone to failure in some unforeseen way. Furthermore, emissions would still be produced by things like farming, manufacturing and various other activities, so thus, the scheme would necessarily be “low-emissions” rather than “no-emissions” or “zero-emissions”, which is the fantasy of the environ-MENTAL-ists. And oil and gas would still be needed to manufacture things like fertilizer, medical goods, plastics, etc.
Go nukes!
The issue is never the issue.
Isn't that the truth. Do you notice how both the democRATs and the islamists want us to be living in the 6th century.
Ha. Considering that we trained and paid the worst of the Islamists I suppose that’s not a surprise—or coincidence.
If you study the energy sector for any length of time you understand the nuclear energy HAS to be a big part of the equation whether we use fossil fuels or not.
Even if we get fusion reactors we have to have better batteries if we want to use electricity for transportation.
“I’ve read fairly recently that petroleum is a mineral product”
Haven’t heard that. If true then those geological forces had to have produced substances that release energy when combined with oxygen.
They don’t care. The purpose is to destroy, not improve. And, in the process the people who approve such crappola skim the $$ for them and their families.
**anti-nuclear propaganda campaign in the 80s & 90s,***
I remember the screaming Miemies in The Mother Earth News constantly barraging against nuclear power and coal power, in the 1970s and 1980s.
Some anti-nuke group got the Inola Black Fox project shut down before much of the ground work could me done.
Of course they proposed lots of alternatives till they paid for their own project(a perpetual engine design) which did not work.
The renewable sources in Europe are probably inadequate for running the trains to which they are addicted
“the “DEFR”. That stands for “Dispatchable Emissions Free Resource.””
Sounds a lot like unicorn farts.
Whenever anyone talks about electrical energy storage they only mention batteries. There are other storage methods: pumped water gravity storage, flywheel kinetic storage, tidal storage etc.
I have no idea how feasible the would be however.
Has anyone considered the environmental cost of producing battery storage on this scale? Our current best battery technology is based on Lithium and several other materials like Cobalt. Production of batteries on this scale would mean huge mining operations, extraction of the materials and then fabrication of the batteries. Environmentalists are death on expanded mining of anything and the extraction of these materials from ores is hazardous and energy intensive. The manufacture of these batteries also creates issues of handouts waste and the handling of very hazardous materials. So to reach this green utopia serious environmental hazards if not potential disasters would be created.
The greenies have already declared jihad on nuclear plants because of the perceived hazards, but seem to have no problem creating a huge battery industry also with high risks and hazards to the environment. Nuclear power has nearly a 70 year history and the risks are quite well understood. Huge battery farms are wholly new and have unknown risks and hazards. Already major fires have occurred in these battery farms in California and Australia with environmental damage yet to be assessed.
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