Posted on 04/29/2024 4:50:00 AM PDT by MtnClimber
In my self-designated role critiquing various schemes for total transformation of the world energy system, I get to review large amounts of poor, shoddy, and incompetent work. When people get into advocating for this “energy transition,” the stars regularly align to bring forth the most extreme levels of ineptitude. Start with the fact that the “smartest” people are filled with arrogance and hubris, but are not actually very smart. Add that many innumerate Politics and English majors have flooded into a field that cries out for engineering calculations. Add too that groupthink and orthodoxy enforcement prevent anyone from pointing out obvious flaws. And then throw in a strong dose of religious zealotry that obstructs the intrusion of anything resembling critical thinking. All in all, it’s a prescription for catastrophe.
But in a field rife with bad, worse, still worse, and even dangerously incompetent work, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anything as shockingly inept as the Report just out from the International Energy Agency with the title “Batteries and Secure Energy Transitions.” The Report has a date only specified to the month of “April 2024,” but the press release came out just two days ago on April 25.
If I had been given the assignment by the North Koreans to write the Report to somehow induce the West to self-destruct, I don’t know how I would have done it differently.
Are you familiar with the International Energy Agency? It is not part of the UN, but rather a separate consortium currently of some 40+ countries, mostly Western and mostly rich, founded in the wake of the oil shocks of the 1970s with a then-goal of promoting energy security. It is based, of course, in Paris. The current (and since 2015) head is a guy named Fatih Barol. Here is a picture of Barol from Wikipedia:
Somewhere along the line the IEA completely lost track of the energy security mission, and turned into an unabashed advocate for the green energy transition. That’s where they are today.
I don’t know how many people work at the IEA, but it seems like most to all of them got in on writing this Report. On page 5 there is a list of some 35 “directors,” “lead authors,” and “principal authors” from among IEA employees, plus another 4 who provided “support,” and then, on pages 6 to 8, some 89 people said to be “high-level government representatives and international experts from outside of the IEA” who somehow “contributed to the process.” From the content of the Report, one has to wonder if any of these people ever completed the study of arithmetic at the sixth-grade level, let alone if any have read any of the important work in this area.
The thesis of the Report is that batteries, and particularly lithium ion batteries, are the key to the impending energy transition, and need to be scaled up massively and immediately with whatever amount of government subsidies and handouts that it takes. Here are a few quotes from the press release:
After their deployment in the power sector more than doubled last year, batteries need to lead a sixfold increase in global energy storage to enable the world to meet 2030 targets. . . . In the first comprehensive analysis of the entire battery ecosystem, the IEA’s Special Report on Batteries and Secure Energy Transitions sets out the role that batteries can play alongside renewables as a competitive, secure and sustainable alternative to electricity generation from fossil fuels. . . . IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol [said,] “Batteries will provide the foundations in both areas, playing an invaluable role in scaling up renewables and electrifying transport while delivering secure and sustainable energy for businesses and households.
I suppose it would be too much for me to expect these grandees to have read my energy storage report, published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation in December 2022. But if you are claiming that you have at hand a “competitive, secure and sustainable alternative to electricity generation from fossil fuels,” as these guys are, there is a series of very obvious question that must be addressed. Those include:
- Quantitatively, how much energy storage, in watt-hours (or gigawatt-hours) will be necessary to provide full back-up to a national electricity grid once all fossil fuel back-up has been banished and the storage is all that is available when the instantaneous generators are not supplying the full demand?
- How much will that amount of storage cost?
- What is the maximum length of time that energy must be held in storage before it is called upon, and is the proposed storage technology capable of the task of storing energy for that period of time?
There are other comparably important questions, but at least those are absolutely essential.
The IEA Report addresses none of them.
What we get instead is endless happy talk about the wonders of lithium ion battery technology, how the costs are falling rapidly, how deployments are soaring, and how utopia (i.e., meeting UN COP 28 emissions reduction targets) is right around the corner if only we accelerate the process with massive government “support.” The full Report is some 159 pages (with appendices and references), so I can only give you a small sample. But here are a few choice quotes from the Executive Summary:
- From page 11: “Batteries are an essential part of the global energy system today and the fastest growing energy technology on the market. Battery storage in the power sector was the fastest growing energy technology in 2023 that was commercially available, with deployment more than doubling year-on-year.”
- Also from page 11: “Lithium-ion batteries dominate battery use due to recent cost reductions and performance improvements. Lithium-ion batteries have outclassed alternatives over the last decade, thanks to 90% cost reductions since 2010, higher energy densities and longer lifetimes.”
- From page 12: “Policy support has given a boost for batteries deployment in many markets but the supply chain for batteries is very concentrated. Strong government support for the rollout of EVs and incentives for battery storage are expanding markets for batteries around the world.” [For the obtuse among the readership, “policy support” is code for vast subsidies and handouts.]
- More from page 12: “Batteries are key to the transition away from fossil fuels and accelerate the pace of energy efficiency through electrification and greater use of renewables in power.”
- Still on page 12: “To triple global renewable energy capacity by 2030 while maintaining electricity security, energy storage needs to increase six-times. To facilitate the rapid uptake of new solar PV and wind, global energy storage capacity increases to 1 500 GW by 2030 in the NZE Scenario, which meets the Paris Agreement target of limiting global average temperature increases to 1.5°C or less in 2100. Battery storage delivers 90% of that growth, rising 14-fold to 1200 GW by 2030.”
Check out that last bullet point. Yes, they are so dumb that they discuss energy storage capacity in GW rather than GWh. How did they come up with the line that to reach their goals “energy storage needs to increase six-times” when they don’t even know the right units to do the calculations? You won’t find an answer in this Report. In my own energy storage report, I calculated that to reach a zero-emissions electricity sector that could get through a year without fossil fuel back-up would require increasing energy storage by something around 10,000 times. I used the correct units and showed how my calculations were done.
And how about the question of the length of time that energy must remain in storage to back-up a wind/solar powered grid, and whether the proposed technology is up to the task? In my own report, which only considered scenarios of getting through a single year, I showed that much of the stored energy would need to be held for 6 - 12 months before use. In a further blog post on September 28, 2023, I covered a new report then out from the UK’s Royal Society (described by me as “semi-competent”), which used 37 years of data. Based on the 37 years of data, that report concluded that hundreds of hours worth of grid peak usage would need to be held in storage for multiple decades in order to get through worst-case sun and wind droughts. I had this quote from the Executive Summary of the Royal Society report:
Wind supply can vary over time scales of decades and tens of TWhs of very long-duration storage will be needed. The scale is over 1000 times that currently provided by pumped hydro in the UK, and far more than could conceivably be provided by conventional batteries.
(Emphasis mine.). I’m ready to forgive these IEA guys for not being familiar with my own report, but not for complete ignorance of the Royal Society’s effort.
The entire discussion that I can find in the IEA Report on the problem of need for massive amounts of very long duration storage consists of a chart and one paragraph of text on page 47. Here is the chart:
And the text:
Iron air and other battery technologies that potentially could enable the storage of electricity over longer durations measured in weeks, are still in their infancy. Currently it is not clear whether those technologies can be developed so as to provide what is required in a cost-efficient way. For even longer duration storage, such as seasonal storage, battery technologies are not fit for purpose, and other mechanical, e.g. pumped storage hydro, and chemical, e.g. hydrogen storage, technologies need to be deployed.
So 90 plus percent of the storage needed to back up the intermittently-supplied grid needs to be stored for months and years, but the only battery technologies that can even last for “weeks” are things that are “in their infancy” and where it is “not clear” that they can be provided in a “cost-efficient way.”
Overall, a shockingly inept and embarrassing piece of work from the IEA. Undoubtedly our government will react by piling forth a few more hundreds of billions of dollars to subsidize batteries to do a job for which they are completely “unsuitable.”
I guess you have to give the political science majors something to do or the crime rate will soar.
Manhattan Contrarian ping
Here’s the money shot!
We need to immediately take money from working people to save the world.
Just another scam to put money in the pockets of rich people by taking it from middle class and the working poor.
And if a volcano goes off and dims the sunlight over a continent for a few months what do you do? It’s like the human race planning its own mass extinction event.
LINK: The Energy Storage Conundrum"
This is a phenomenally well done paper.
It is actually quite alarming, but I would rather be supplied with facts than with the Unicorn Farts and Pixie Dust these mental midgets in the various governmental and UN Agencies have been providing to the public.
Poli-sci majors make for poor scientists...................
What about a good old fashioned lead battery?
Oh, wait.
It’s the evil lead.
Nevermind
“What about a good old fashioned lead battery?”
Old Fashioned: Yes
But I haven’t seem a good one in decades.
What they are making these days have inferior plates and won’t last 5 years.
Bring back the glass encased, 20 year cells.
Good post, thank you. But I have to argue one point based on perspective.
“but are not actually very smart.”
Depends on perspective. When you realize their true ulterior end goals they are right on top of it. The true end goal is to flip the switch off and throw us back to cave man status to reduce population in mass. They are doing an excellent job of setting up the perfect storm to do just that.
It is not supposed to actually work, that is the true plan.
IEA-Insistent Expert Aholes
FWIW, my lithium-ion batteries give me back only 90% of the power sent to them. Last year, my inverters sent a total of 12.0667 MWh to the batteries, and got back 10.8805 MWh. A 10% loss through the process of storing power to the batteries, the batteries holding the charge usually for less than half a day, and discharging the power from the batteries. It'd be a much larger loss if the batteries were expected to hold a charge for months to make it through the winter.
That 10% loss was expected and is within the parameters of me meeting my goals of being 80% energy independent (with me pulling from the grid 20% of my power needs for my all-electric house, including charging the EV which we do most of our driving in).
I'd have to probably double my solar capacity, inverter capacity, and battery capacity to be 100% energy independent. Why that much needed for the last 20%? Because of the law of diminishing returns. It's simply not feasible.
And that's for just a 2-person home (and 2-person driving). Imagine trying to be 100% "green energy" for not just a home, but a city, with large buildings, and large power needs like a hospital building or a manufacturing plant.
And that's with my warm sunny climate in Alabama. Imagine a northern city trying to be 100% energy independent. It'd be ridiculously expensive and even then require a lot of restrictions on their energy consumptions during rainy winters. Going all "green" is just a fantasy.
And not a single locality, government, or agency ANYWHERE has seriously begun exploring and designing energy storage facilities of ANY kind.
Zero. Nada. Zilch. Squat.
And yet, like lemmings, our governments are actually, and deliberately rushing headlong to asinine Net Zero goals WITHOUT EVEN AN INKLING THAT RENEWABLES WILL NOT BE ABLE TO PROVIDE 24 HOUR DISTRIBUTION OF ENERGY.
What our own government, and others around the world are doing can be described with this analogy:
The sixty day limit is the fabled NetZero target date. And they are doing this in the idiotic and immoral "hope" that technology is going to provide a miracle cure that will bail them out.
I remember that in high School you could tell who did their homework and who slapped it together at the last minute. You could just tell...
It seems to me that an awful lot of reports coming out these days from ‘officials’ look just like that.
The Brain-dead and their green energy
Batteries are better then ever. Way back in the good old days, a top shelf car battery had an 18 month warranty.
The 12 volt system was introduced in 1956 - then new high compression engines, AC, power accessories, meant the 6 volt electric system couldn’t keep up, especially with generator charging systems.
Modern cars and trucks have all that stuff and more. Security systems, satellite comms, all sorts of parasitic drains. Check the voltage after a few days and they are depleted. There is enough juice to reliably start the engine - but the battery will be toast in just a fraction of its potential service life.
Just...wow.
My last trip with lead acid was the Deka sealed 12 volt ones.
Didn’t get five years before almost every one was dropping one cell. New they were going for $450. I bought them 3 years old and had nothing but issues.
My usage was 4 in series to get 48 volts for a solar inverter. I could float them to 54v, but when called upon, they would undervolt within unreasonable time.
Not worth the details, they are in the heap.
Today I am a happy camper with 280ah LiFeP04.
“I’d have to probably double my solar capacity, inverter capacity, and battery capacity to be 100% energy independent.”
Lived completely off grid for over 12 years. About to go back off grid again. The first important step is just changing lifestyle so that you require less power. Believe it or not, folks once lived just fine without any electricity at all. Reducing demand is the first step to becoming 100% energy independent.
I’m pretty happy with my 51.2V/100Ah LifePo4’s. All 18 of them. Total 92kWh. And with my two inverters at most demanding 18kW of continuous power from them, that means at most I’m draining each battery at a rate of only 1kW. So it’s not like I’m working them hard. They ought to last beyond the 19-year/50% warranty. Six of them are three years old and so far I haven’t seen the slightest degradation.
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