Let’s face it, lots of people aren’t very good at math, even rather basic math. On the other hand, some people are quite good at it. If you aren’t very good at math, there are plenty of other things for you to do in life. My own field of law practice mostly does not require much skill at math, and there a plenty of math-challenged people who are nevertheless very good lawyers.
But some big societal decisions require a certain level of math competence. Some of these decisions can involve multi-hundreds of billions of dollars, or even multi-trillions of dollars. For example, consider the question of whether proposed electricity generation system X has the capability to deliver the amount of electricity a state or region needs, and at the times it is needed. Answering this question is just a matter of applied basic arithmetic. Given the dollars involved, you would think that when a question like this is being addressed, it would be time to call in some people who could do the arithmetic, or who at least would be willing to try.
Yet when the issue is replacing generation of electricity by fossil fuels with generation by “renewables,” it seems that the need to believe that the renewables will work and be cost effective is so powerful that all efforts to do the arithmetic get banished. I last considered this issue in a post last week titled “California’s Zero Carbon Plans: Can Anybody Here Do Basic Arithmetic?” The answer for the California government electricity planners was a resounding “NO.” Today, the Wall Street Journal joins the math-challenged club with a front page story headlined “Batteries Challenge Natural Gas As America’s No. 1 Power Source.” (probably behind pay wall)
The theme of the story is that “renewable” energy sources, such as solar, paired with batteries to balance periods of low production, are rapidly becoming so cheap that they are likely to “disrupt” natural gas plants that have only recently been constructed:
[T]he combination of batteries and renewable energy is threatening to upend billions of dollars in natural-gas investments, raising concerns about whether power plants built in the past 10 years—financed with the expectation that they would run for decades—will become “stranded assets,” facilities that retire before they pay for themselves. . . . But renewables have become increasingly cost-competitive without subsidies in recent years, spurring more companies to voluntarily cut carbon emissions by investing in wind and solar power at the expense of that generated from fossil fuels.
To bolster the theme, we are introduced to industry executives who are shifting their investment strategies away from natural gas to catch the new renewables-plus-batteries wave. For example:
Vistra Corp. owns 36 natural-gas power plants, one of America’s largest fleets. It doesn’t plan to buy or build any more. Instead, Vistra intends to invest more than $1 billion in solar farms and battery storage units in Texas and California as it tries to transform its business to survive in an electricity industry being reshaped by new technology. “I’m hellbent on not becoming the next Blockbuster Video, ” said Vistra Chief Executive Curt Morgan.
But how does one of these solar-plus-battery systems work? Or for that matter, how does a wind-plus-battery system work? Can anybody do the arithmetic here to demonstrate how much battery capacity (in both MW and MWH) it will take to balance out a given set of solar cells at some particular location so that no fossil fuel backup is needed? You will not find that in this article.
Here’s something that ought to be obvious: solar panels at any location in the northern hemisphere will produce less power in the winter than in the summer. The days are shorter, and the sun is lower in the sky and consequently weaker. Therefore, any system consisting solely of solar panels plus batteries, where the batteries are seeking to balance the system over the course of a year, will see the batteries drawn down continuously from September to March, and then recharged from March to September. Do batteries that can deal with such an annual cycle of seasons even exist? From the Journal piece:
And while batteries can provide stored power when other sources are down, most current batteries can deliver power only for several hours before needing to recharge. That makes them nearly useless during extended outages. . . . Most current storage batteries can discharge for four hours at most before needing to recharge.
OK, then, so if solar-plus-battery systems are about to displace natural gas plants, what’s the plan for winter? They won’t say. The fact is, the only possible plans are either fossil fuel backup or trillions upon trillions of dollars worth of batteries. But the author never mentions any of that. How much fossil fuel backup? That’s an arithmetic calculation that is not difficult to make. But the process of making the calculation forces you to actually propose the characteristics of your solar-plus-battery system, which then makes the costs obvious. How much excess capacity of solar panels and batteries do you plan to build to minimize the down periods? Do you need solar panel capacity of four times peak usage, or ten times? Do you need battery capacity of one week’s average usage (in GWH) or two weeks or a full month?
The simple fact is that wind/solar plus battery systems would not need any government subsidies if they were cost effective. The Biden Administration is proposing to hand out many, many tens of billions of dollars to subsidize building these systems. They are clearly not cost-effective, and not even close. But no one in a position to know will make the relatively simple calculations to let us know how much this is going to cost.
Value added batteries, coming to a United Fruitcake Outlet near you.
Always read the fine print. All of these green schemes require “Demand Side Management” components. In plain language, DSM requires operators to cut off your usage when the system becomes deficient in generation or transmission capacity. Currently, utilities must pay industries that can stand such outages. I assume the cost estimates of ‘dream’ future electric systems don’t include paying you to accept such outages.
AKA “smart metering”.
There is only one safe, effective, proven alternative to “carbon” as an energy source: nuclear. The Progressive Green New Dealers refuse to discuss this simple fact. This shows their agenda is not Global Warming. Their agenda is crippling our modern free market-based industrial society.
Anyone serious about CO2-caused Global Warming would get serious about nuclear energy.
“Can’t do basic arithmetic “? If your (secret) goal is to force demand to follow supply and at the same time drive down demand you ignore the math. You just lie.
They can do the math – they just don’t.
The Moss Landing BESS being set up by Vistra is actually at Luminant’s (formerly Dynegy owned) 1 GW natural gas-fired power plant. So it is being recharged by natural gas. The title of the WSJ story, “Natural Gas, America’s No. 1 Power Source, Already Has a New Challenger: Batteries” is completely nonsensical because in no way is natural gas being “challenged” by batteries when natural gas is being used to recharge the batteries after a 4 hour discharge cycle. The WSJ writer here, Katherine Blunt, is just being stupidly slathering for both Luminant and Vistra in their harvesting tax subsidies.
And anyone who has spent anytime at all in the Monterey Bay area knows that fog rolls-in in the winter and can stay for days. So there is no way the engineers who design and operate these battery systems can expect solar PV to somehow magically be the dependable power source to charge those batteries. This is just another scheme to harvest tax money and provide feel good projects that in no way actually reduces emissions when the entirety of battery life cycle is taken into account, especially batteries charged by natural gas due to the heat losses incurred in charging and discharging batteries.
Batteries banks somehow magically generate power, at least that’s how they appear to cost that power.
Mind you these are the same people that think hydro power can carry on indefinitely into the night to recharge car batteries.
They can’t seem to understand that hydro dams are themselves batteries that need to be recharged.
When trying to develop “renewable” energy sources for electricity generation, with storage batteries, one aspect that is frequently overlooked is converting direct current to alternating current and vice versa.
All electric motors require alternating current (AC), which varies sinusoidally with time, because it is the changes in the magnetic field across the coil that generates the torque to turn the coil. Conventional power plants use fossil fuel to generate steam, which is used to turn a turbine which can generate alternating current using the same principle (a generator is essentially an electric motor run backward). Natural gas turbines also generate alternating current, except that hot combustion gases instead of steam are used to drive the turbine.
Over time, since electric motors require alternating current, and rotating generators produce alternating current, the two technologies were well adapted to each other, and alternating current became the standard means for delivering electric power from where it is generated to where it is needed. Alternating current can also be easily transformed from high voltage and low current to low voltage and higher current as needed, with little energy losses.
One problem with storage batteries is that they cannot store alternating current–they can only store a charge difference across an electrolyte, which must be charged using direct current (DC–one direction only) and produces direct current when discharged. Also, it is not possible to store much voltage between the electrodes of a battery, since a high voltage could result in a spark, with discharges the battery explosively. Conversion of AC to DC or DC to AC both result in significant energy losses. .
Rotating wind turbines do produce alternating current, although there is the problem of adjusting the frequency of the current generated to match that of AC generated from fossil-fuel plants despite varying wind speeds, so that the end users always receive the current at the same frequency.
Photovoltaic solar panels generate direct current, which works well for charging a battery, but there is still the problem of converting DC to AC for the end user. They are also not very efficient, with only about 15% of the received solar energy converted into electricity. Adding in the energy losses in converting DC to AC, and photovoltaic solar panels simply do not generate much useful electric power.
Another problem with solar energy is that it is most available when it is least needed–on clear days in late spring and early summer. The only electrical demand which is highest during hot weather is air conditioning, so that it may be feasible to install photovoltaic solar panels whose only function is to provide power for air conditioners. This may be feasible for large apartment buildings or condominiums, with solar panels on the roof providing power for central air conditioning during daylight hours.
A better use of solar energy than photovoltaic electricity production would be for heat pumps, where a heat-transfer fluid could be pumped through tubes in solar panels, with a transparent top surface but the bottom surface painted black to absorb solar heat, using a true “greenhouse effect” to trap heat in the panel and transfer it to the fluid, which would then be stored in a heavily insulated container. During cold weather, this fluid could be circulated through tubes inside a building to provide heat, and reduce the load on oil or gas-fired furnaces.
But there is no good reason to subsidize technologies that cannot possibly provide as much energy as proven, existing technologies. Let the market decide which energy-production technologies provide more benefit than cost, without forcing taxpayers to fund losers over winners.
The Wall Street Journal today published a correction, admitting that they had erroneously overstated the energy density of lithium ion batteries as 9 megajoules per kilowatt, instead of the actual 0.9 megajoules per kilowatt. An order of magnitude error. It does make a difference in how one judges batteries.
Per Kilogram I hope
One again, the efficiency of renewables is utterly irrelevant in the current conversation. It is not the form of energy which is important, but the amounts of money involved.
The fact that renewables require subsidies is why they are so heavily promoted. The less efficient they are, the more subsidies they require. Since the subsidies are in the form of “other people’s money,” matters like efficiency, profit, and accountability don’t matter.
The government has deeper pockets than any other entity, and it is hardly surprising that companies like Vistra are salivating over receiving billions in subsidies rather than be required to earn a profit.
Our political systems are being corrupted by the powers-that-be, who profit heavily by controlling the spending of other people’s money. Awarding such-and-such company a $10 billion subsidy will create a huge negative return to the taxpayers, but the politicians who grant that contract are guaranteed generous campaign contributions in return, not to mention lucrative jobs for their friends and family members.
This is not a left vs right issue, because the left and right are equally responsible for the economic calamity they are constructing. This is simply a matter of greed and corruption on an ever increasing scale.
Oh, Charles, how naive you are.
They don’t need to do any silly math. Our new ruling class is doling out trillions for these glorious pet projects. They need not justify costs to the next six generations, and they will never need to demonstrate that their “investments “ even work.
For the wisest of businessmen there is a tsunami of cash on the horizon, and we’re gonna get our share!
The only math required will be for deciding how big a piggy bank we’ll need to build.
The US installed electric generating capacity is 1 TW. Backing that up for a week requires 168 TW-hr of storage. Look up Mighty Max 12 V, 1000 A-hr battery packs on Algore’s amazing internet. You’ll find them for $1,800 on Amazon.
To store the 168 TW-hr for a week’s worth of grid downtime would require a mere 14 billion of these packs, at a total cost of $25 trillion. Then there are the 1 TW worth of wind turbines needed for baseload (actually 3 times that for availability factor). Assuming we have only one net windless week every 3 months (4 aggregate events per year), we would need 77 GW more wind turbines (again, 3 times that for availability factor) to keep the backup batteries charged.
My favorite wind turbine is the Vestas 4 MW. We would need a grand total of 807,750 of them to provide the baseload plus 4 weeks/year backup, assuming 33% availability, for the above example. These turbines, installed, run about $4 million apiece. So that’s another $3.2 trillion.
So for wind and practical battery, we are looking at a minimum of $28.2 trillion equipment, and that doesn’t include all of the power conditioning and distribution equipment to connect to the grid. Let’s be generous, and say that it is only 10% more. That’s $31 trillion.
A 1,100 MW nuclear plant was estimated, in 2009, to cost a maximum of $9 billion. Let’s say it’s now $12 billion. To get a 1 TW baseload capability, plus 10% for availability factor, we would require 1,000 nuclear plants. Total cost: $12 trillion. To replace our entire existing electric generating capacity.
Further comparison only makes the “renewable” route look worse.
I won’t invoke the “rocket scientist” bromide, because I actually am one. I’m also an engineer, and know that if first order cost estimates are this far apart, one can discard the more expensive – and even the less expensive one may be too expensive.
My Tesla PV panels produce about 30% of Summer electricity production during the Winter. My 3.12 kW system produces enough electricity during roughly half the year to exceed my usage, but during midwinter, its production is well below my usage. The system was sized to match annual usage to average production. I believe that this is how most roof top PV systems have been designed.
I could add a Powerwall or two to my PV system and that would get my through about 6 months without taking any power from the grid (on average). The problem is that in the winter, my PV system would need to be much larger with several Powerwalls to produce enough electricity to keep me sending power to the grid (on average). I said “on average” because several cloudy days would drain any battery system that I could afford.
I have not heard any of the renewable proponents explain how you get solar electricity to keep things running 365 days per year.
For arithmetic you don’t need math, politicians can’t even do simple arithmetic these days.