Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t Dr. Willie Soon; If Energy Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has calculated how much must be spent on energy storage to stabilise a 100% renewable grid, she does not seem keen to share.
Why Treasury Secretary Yellen testified that climate change ‘must be addressed’
Grace O’Donnell·Assistant Editor
Mon, October 4, 2021, 11:54 PMSecretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen recently reiterated her stance that climate change poses a threat to the U.S. economy.
“Climate change is an existential threat, and it is a very high priority of President Biden’s and of mine to address it,” Yellen told the Senate Banking Committee last week.
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Yellen also responded to a question about the Biden administration’s plans to shift U.S. energy to be reliant on renewable sources by 2035.
“I don’t believe that the president’s program is going to lead to increases in the cost of energy,” Yellen said, referring to the fuel shortage and high gas prices in the UK and Europe more broadly.
She added that “in the case of the UK, there’s a question of what to do if the sun isn’t out and the wind doesn’t blow, and I believe there is storage technologies that can be deployed and, you know, other means to address that, and of course that has to be part of a plan to switch to renewables and address climate change.”
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Read more: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/treasury-secretary-yellen-climate-change-135431579.html
A while ago I performed a rough calculation, total cost of wind turbines to produce enough annual power, to replace the current US generator fleet is around $20 trillion.
But the cost of battery storage to redistribute the peaks and troughs into a smooth supply throughout the year, by my calculation, was around $50 trillion. My rough calculation didn’t take seasonal variations in supply and demand into account – that $50 trillion only buys you five days backup, and assumes the batteries have a full charge at the start of the 5 day “energy drought”.
Maybe my rough calculation is wrong. But hand waving proposed expenditure of anything like that magnitude just isn’t good enough.
US Treasury Secretary Yellen must be totally candid about her department’s green energy generation and storage cost calculations, her calculation parameters, her expenditure timeframe, and explain to the American people how the USA will be more financially stable after the USA borrows or raises 10s of trillions of dollars, and somehow passes those costs onto US businesses and consumers.
President Obama, whatever his faults, was honest and forthcoming about what his plan would do to the cost of energy. The Biden administration should at least match President Obama’s candour on what his green energy revolution will do to the energy bills of the American people.
Correction (EW): h/t TonyL, dk_ – First paragraph mistakenly called Yellen the energy secretary.
One thing is for certain, she seems adept at talking out of her ass. I’m guessing she knows even less about economics than she does about “climate”. Anyone who believes that any of them have the vaguest interest in the climate or the US economy is sadly delusional. It has been clear for more than a generation that, but for a few holdouts, the Democrat party is interested in nothing but staying in power in perpetuity. The rest is just window dressing for the media.
Yes, the same absurd denial of physics, economics and engineering on the subject of energy is found in establishment circles in the UK. Even in people with science degrees or background in economics.
Its really, really weird. If this were WWII they would be proposing doing D-Day with sailing ships on the grounds that the real problem was to avoid the noise of engines, and that sailing ships would do the job cheaper.
Its the continuing approach of, do things that are either impossible, unaffordable or incredibly environmentally destructive (or often all three) to address an imaginary problem. Which most of the time, even if you do it, it will make no difference to the supposed problem.
As with, lets convert Britain to hydrogen which we derive from natural gas. First convert the whole transmission network, including the internal pipework. Then replace all the boilers and stoves. Then make your hydrogen by processing natural gas (which produces more emissions). And when you have got through with all this, you have made negligible reductions in UK CO2 emissions. In fact you may even have increased them.
And the UK emissions you are trying to reduce are anyway a negligible proportion of global emissions.
It is completely insane.
Perhaps the Treasury Secretary is having trouble with the return on investment bit.
There are unfortunately too many people in leading positions who “believe” instead of having solid knowledge about the facts. This situation is unfortunately the hallmark of a decadent civilization.
How to cost storage is just = brain-ache
Barely a few days ago, Alibaba felt duty-bound to send me something and I ventured into the Big Batteries they sell.
Starting with a chunky 3.2Volt 500Ah LiFeO4 cell, I got a cost of
General rule-of-thumb says we double that 15 pence to transport and install the beast, thus = £300 per kWh for the installed & working battery
But its 2,000 cycle life bring is all full circle and it thus ‘battery cost‘ amounts to 15pence for every kWh that cycles through the thing.
This is before you’ve begged/borrowed/stolen/bought/made any electricity.
Maybe now take into account charging/discharging and conversion losses, let’s say= 20 pence per kWh
Which to a very first approximation doubles the current UK retail price of UK electricity. Everything can only track inflation there-after…
Which planet are these people on, who are they talking to, who is selling this garbage?
What happened to honesty, decency and trust?
Did you factor in that the energy storage ability of batteries goes down with time, so the average storage is less than the amount you think and that they need regularly replacing at huge annual cost.
In the UK we have used pump storage to store nuclear energy overnight and release it the next day. But, as the top civil servant in the department told me about two decades ago: “we’re used all the good sites”. (three). And as I calculated, we needed well over 100 of the same sites.
The only thing Yellen knows about energy is it comes in a little plastic bottle and has 4hour in front of it.
Re: redistribution/storage of energy: the using of pumped-storage water reservoirs a la the Northfield Mountain Project on the Connecticut River in Massachusetts. Northfield had nighttime power production used to pump water from the river which was then fed back through penstocks and generators during the daytime. True, the variation of water levels may have caused the slow collapse of the railroad bridge at East Northfield (one mid-river concrete pier collapsed 1998; a shoreline pier started collapsing 25 years or so earlier) and the power may have come from the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant. Discuss whether this approach is worth it.
The stage is now set for the Jimmy Carter presidency part 2.
Biden is actually making Jimmy Carter look competent and astute.
All indicators point to a major carbon tax push to pay for unrelated entitlement spending in the U.S. Janet Yellen is one of the main indicators while looking the other way on the $6 T spending spree in DC. That was the original plan with Waxman-Markey-Obama Carbon Tax Bill and with enough daily propaganda since then they are setting the table for another run at that. Janet knows the plan.
I wonder if the adjective A. N. I. L. E. will get past the censorious censor-bot.
Yellen even looks like an anile hag.
“I don’t believe that the president’s program is going to lead to increases in the cost of energy,” Yellen said
Here is a fine example of a safe, no-consequence prediction in the tradition of “who could have known” Jimmy Carter policy from Edward Markey.
The only current readily deployable storage system would be something like this 5 year-old bit of sarcasm that is now beyond parody:
Mercedes trolluje branżę elektrycznych samochodów w SNL. – YouTube
There is Obama saying quite clearly energy prices will skyrocket. Who benefits, well guess, it’s not you, son…
The insane money printing going on for the last years is about to unleash hyperinflation – the cargo backed up at US ports has hyperinflated-per-container.
Since this is essentially a financial disaster, the Secretary knows full well what she calculates – a green bubble to inflate out of certain collapse, for a while.
It’s another bailout.
Old saying: “Let them eat cake!”
New saying: “Let them store energy!”
Let them use candles
Another resident of the land of jabberwocky. I think she’s saying “Mimsy are the borogoves, and the momraths outgrabe.” Just like her boss.
Why can’t Leftists do simple math or exercise simple logic?
A simple napkin note calculation follows for going 100% nuclear power:
100 nuclear plants generate 20% of US’s power.
An 400 additional plants the size of the Palo Verde nuclear facility (the largest in US) could generate more than 100% of current needs, so let’s add 100 more to cover future EV demand for a total of 500 nuclear plants.
Palo Verde cost $12 billion ( in current dollars)
500 new nuclear plants x $12 billion= $6 trillion…
Going full wind/solar would cost roughly $70 trillion, plus the cost per kWh would be 3 times more expensive than nuclear power (an order of magnitude more expensive).
Moreover, if we built LFTRs (Thorium molten salt reactors) instead of LWRs (current nuclear technology) they’d be much safer, efficient and cheaper to build and run, and would require no water because they use Brayton generators.
What is wrong with these people?
“What is wrong with these people?”
They are divorced from reality, and the ones who are not, are full of greed and are taking advantage of the situation for personal/political reasons.
What is wrong with these people? Answer: They are mental infants in adult bodies who cannot use logic and reason, but use wishful thinking and make-believe instead.
How much longer till COP26? They have already booked all the air time and ad placements.
Ask not what your government can do for you, but what you can do for the climate crusades.
As an economic Keynesian she probably applied this Harry Potter multiplicative approach to energy storage, as well.
These people have an ejaculation when they say what they say.
Debating them is as useful as bebating ejaculates.
The Left is bound and determined to do for energy what Stalin did for soviet agriculture.
What a Silly Bunt…
If you think she’s bad, you should read about the new U.S. Comptroller of the Currency that works for Yellen and who’s appointment Yellen opposed. It’s another Bernie dictate.
The solution is to build several hundred 2GW nuclear power plants, put up a lot of lanscaping to hide the reactors, and label the facility as a “Green Power Storage Facility”.
Presto! Problem solved. It’s a PR problem, not engineering.