Reposted from the MANHATTAN CONTRARIAN/ Francis Menton
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.
Net-Zero has a lot in common with the now-defunct company Theranos. The NYT was a whistleblower for the Theranos fraud. Yet they are happily complicit with Net-Zero and the whole Greenie Scam Biz. Sad.
It was the Wall Street Journal that was the whistle blower.
Nice picture of Justin Trudeau in the header.
But that is his default look on every problem
But he can be relied upon to apologize for any problems.
If fact he apologizes for EVERY problem, even if there is no credible evidence of any real problem existing.
I bet a sneak peek at his diary would have a reserved block titled –
DELIVER APOLOGY FOR ________________ (T.B.A.)
We can easily approach Net Zero without any honking great batteries. The one (and most likely only) viable option is nuclear power. The nuclear forces are how we reach the necessary energy density.
The French have already proven the absolute viability of the approach.
And yet, none of other western leaders are the slightest bit interested because, of course, they have an entirely different agenda from that which they promulgate.
This ^
My favorite storage fantasy is to assume we can simply use electric vehicles. We want to electrify everything anyway so all vehicles will have big batteries. Simply keep them all plugged in and charging from the excess renewable generation. Then when generation isn’t enough generate electricity from those plugged in vehicles.
Other than the complete lack of practicality this idea is fantastic! Surround an expensive battery with a car or truck. Ration who can drive when based on the mix of solar/wind generation and the probabilities of generation failure (night and/or calm winds). Sounds like a great plan to me!
I twigged that about rating batteries in MW & GW in the American Clean Power Association article on California. It’s meaningless. Watts are a unit of RATE of doing work or of providing or consuming energy, If Watts are the units of the rate of flow of energy, then the actual quantity of ENERGY provided or consumed in a given time is the product of the RATE of provision or consumption of energy (Watts) times that given time, that is, Watt seconds (Joules), Kilowatt hours, Gigawatt hours etc. If you have a battery, you want to know how much energy it can provide, not the rate at which it can provide it, so you want to know its capacity in Watt hours, Megawatt hours, Gigawatt hours etc. The article was probably written as usual by some journalist with not even a basic knowledge of science & scientific measurement.
General Atomics sells fast capacitors for various applications. One has a voltage rating of 100 kV, and can deliver a maximum current of 60,000 A. That corresponds to a maximum delivered power of 6 GW. Sounds like a winner, right?
Its capacitance is 100 nano Farads, so the total energy it can store is 500 J. That corresponds to 0.0001389 kW-hr (1.389E-10 GW-hr).
Storing just one hour’s worth of electricity for 6 GW-hr energy capacity would require 43 billion of these caps. They weigh about 6.9 kg each, and occupy a volume of 0.00374 m^3. You’d need 297 million metric tons of them, occupying a cube 544 meters (1,785 feet) on a side to produce your 6 GW-hr.
Sure, a capacitor is not necessarily the best example – though it does have the requisite charge/discharge rate, and life cycle capability. Ultracapacitors don’t fare much better, so don’t try going there….
course they thought of it…
UK govt just invested £6.7 million in 24 start up long term storage projects, for example
No they haven’t thought about it. They haven’t a clue how much stoage is necessary, or how it could be realistically achieved at acceptable cost. See my post earlier, where they consider 3 hours to be “long duration”, and 60GWh of batteries to be sufficient storage.
Governments do not “invest.” They take money they’ve acquired via taxation, borrowing or printing, and they subsidize favored, fashionable and faddish projects to further an agenda.
Griff, grid scale dispatchable electricity storage is a PHYSICS / ENGINEERING challenge first and foremost.
Throw all the $$$$s you like at making the sun come up in the west for a change – but it just ain’t gonna happen!
Griff,
Has it ever occurred to you to ask why it is the UK govt that is pouring taxpayer money into wind energy and the storage batteries for them?
If wind and solar were commercially viable against fossil fuels and nuclear (or better even), they would not need govt mandates and money to begin with. The private sector would invest in wind and solar itself without any govt coercion. The fossil fuel power plants would be shutdown in the face of competition from so-called “renewables”.
The wind and solar energy (and storage) industries are nothing more than an artificial product of government on both sides of the pond. They are a manifestation of ignorant and irresponsible govt bureaucrats pandering to politically connected special interests, nothing more.
If you took a cold hard look at feasibility studies involving the physics, engineering and economics of wind and solar, you would know this. Foolish and blind religious faith in unreliablles precludes you from doing so. So-called “renewables” are an ignorant “solution” in search of a problem.
6,7 million. OK, now increase that by 10,000 times and you just might be 1% of your way to your goa..
WOW £6.7 million that won’t even get the compliance, application and enviroment reports and lunch meetings done 🙂
Come back when the number goes in the trillions and we might think they are serious.
Tasmania is a state of Australia which, around 1960, was 100% hydro power and its largest storage had a capacity of around A WHOLE YEAR energy supply for the state. There was a major drought and, even with that huge storage of renewable energy, the state just got through without the lights going off with major power rationing, aerial cloud seeding and rapidly installed oil fired gas turbines as well as a generator ship which was found somewhere surplus from WWII.
If you want 100% renewable, YOU CANNOT HAVE ENOUGH STORAGE. A full year’s energy use is the bare minimum – not a day or a week. Weather is continuously variable over long time spans and is often quite similar over very wide areas. Think long stretches of calm, windless overcast dry days. Has anyone put the statistics together on grid-wide bases – I am not even sure long and wide data sets exist for solar radiation.
A few years ago I had occasion to look up some data on an official Iowa State power system website that presented various summaries of output from their, at that time, coal and wind powdered generating system. One summary compared the average wind capacity factor for the six coldest months vs the six warmest months. Cold averaged 48%, warm averaged 16%.
With six months of the year only providing 16% of capacity, there would be a need for much more than a 3X overbuild, or a heck of a lot more long term storage filled during the colder months..
For NY’s DEFR program: by the time this is supposed to come on line, there may be a lot of, by then, teenagers from the Congo that will have run out of cobalt to mine. Put them to work in NY running large squirrel cages attached to generators.
“Could this get any more ridiculous?” Actually, yes it can – when we’re forced to pay for it!
Unfortunately, there are problems with this article that turns it into a simple rant, rather than anything useful.
To determine the amount of energy storage a system requires you must first decide:
For instance in the Australian context of which I have some knowledge the best analysis that I am aware of suggests that somewhere in the region of 7 days (not 30) of storage is required as load is summer peaking and there is a degree of geographical and meteorological diversity.
Another major failure in the article is to assume that LFP batteries will form the basis of the long term storage. Madness and a straw man that simply weakens the whole point.
If the article pointed out that in the NYC case no such study has been published by a reputable planning body and questioned why such an obvious step has not been done it might have more impact.
I agree – I refer to the storage estimate as highly conservative below.
For Australia, I determined that 750GWH of storage would be enough coupled with 240GW of solar collectors in central Australia.
Twiggy is working on the storage in the form of “green” hydrogen. That will yield Musk scale subsidies.
You would do well to look at this work:
https://euanmearns.com/australia-energy-storage-and-the-blakers-study/
How much generation are you shedding?
Your points have a degree of validity, but let’s look at the consequences:
LOLP is usually expressed in terms of what the average consumer can expect over the course of a year as power cuts: most of these are in fact cause by local distribution problems with downed power lines in bad weather or the loss of a transformer, and have little to do with generation. It is a different matter when discussing a shortage of generation across the whole grid that could threaten grid wide blackout. Of course plant reliability statistics allow us to make good estimates of how much plant we need to guard against plant breakdowns, but such numbers are largely meaningless for intermittent renewables where the key variable is nature’s input. In any case, adjusting for plant reliability simply implies you need to invest more to offset, so it isn’t going to help the numbers.
Interties and interconnectors are often suggested as solutions to renewables shortages. Reality is all too often that such an assumption is the weak point. Take Tasmania’s problems when the Bass Strait cable failed just after they had run down their hydro reservoirs helping out Victoria and they had inadequate reservoir replenishment. They had to import emergency diesel generators to keep the lights on. Or the blackout in South Australia that inevitably became state wide when the Heywood interconnector failed. The reality is that if adjoining states and countries all move towards attempting to rely on renewables they will suffer the effects of high correlation of low renewables output, often at times of high demand: the interconnectors become useless when there is no surplus power to transmit, and only serve to create a huge imbalance between supply and demand with the richest consumers being those who can afford to bid for the reduced available supply – if it is made available at all. The only security is having local dispatchable generation. Equally problematic are times of high surplus production: we already see countries using phase shift transformers to block power dumping on their grids, and negative pricing reflecting the costs of being forced to shut down plant – something that gets even more injurious when exporting country consumers are paying subsidies to make it happen, and also leads to high peak demands for transmission that are hard to justify investing for because they are rarely needed.
Grid of the future studies tend to operate with the “copper plate assumption” that at least within countries or TSOs there are no transmission constraints. The effect of such assumptions is to undercount the need for grid transmission assets, and also to underestimate the generation that is curtailed due to grid constraints and the dispatchable generation that must be dispatched to replace it, All of this implies that high renewables grids are going to be much more costly than the estimates imply (and would need even more storage).
One of the biggest weaknesses of many future grid studies is their use of estimated weather generation relationships. They rely on short term correlation statistics that take no proper account of longer term weather pattern features and grossly underestimate the real impact of lengthy periods of Dunkelflaute. Work that look at real histories is actually a much better basis.
I would also agree that much more work needs to be done on forecasting demand profiles. When you look at some of the forecasts you find that they have probably been massaged to try to create profiles that are both unrealistic and at the same time less challenging for high renewables grids to supply. No awkward seasonal demand is a key characteristic. Much of the work on DSR tends to assume that the response is available when needed: they do not explain what happens on the 2nd to nth days of Dunkelflaute when all the V2G surplus was used on Day 1, or that people cannot indefinitely tolerate having their heating and cooling and appliances switched off. They don’t begin to look at keeping a grid working 24×7 for years on end.
I levy these criticism precisely at the studies that purport to claim that high renewables grids are feasible let alone whether they are affordable. Work by those like Francis Menton challenges the key false premises that these people are adopting.
Incidentally, I agree that batteries are never going to be a viable solution to large scale grid storage needs – however it is necessary to run the numbers in order to disabuse the notions of so many lay people who do not understand that. The place for batteries is a short term supply smoothers where their response speed is an advantage. People are gaily told that we only need a few battereis and everything will be alright: it’s not true. I have spent a deal of time looking at alternatives, and really the only ones that merit more serious study are hydro schemes and power to gas. The former are limited for most countries by lack of potential sites on the scale that would be required. Even where there are potential sites they would be highly controversial.
The economics of power to gas do not look at all good, with low round trip efficiencies and low utilisation rates being largely insurmountable obstacles.
I have mentioned before my conversation with the Minister for Energy and Climate Change who didn’t know that you have to use generated electricity at once or find some way to store it. He literally didn’t know. He hadn’t been briefed by his civil servants at the Ministry for Energy and Climate Change.
Perhaps the civil servants did not know either.
JF
This is a HIGHLY conservative basis for determining storage requirement.
I run some of my household load off-grid using solar. The battery is sized to power the load for 48 hours. The solar panels are sized to power the load over 48 hours with just 2 hours of sunlight (I am at 37S). The battery has gone flat 4 times over ten years – on every occasion was in May due to persistent cloudiness. I could have avoided the battery going flat by using a tiny petrol or gas generator for a few hours on the days the battery went flat.
Your conservative basis is not the economic solution. The economic solution is to overbuild on the energy collection and include some limited dispatchable generation – in this insane world, that would be offset by giving up a bit more farmland. In Australia, Twiggy Forrest is working on the dispatchable generation by producing “green” hydrogen from otherwise curtailed generation and it will be a subsidy harvester without equal.
Curtailment is already a big issue for wind and solar subsidy farmers because it has now got to 10% of installed capacity. All that potential output lost because there were limited storage.
I determine that Australia NEM (Eastern States) needs 750GWh of storage and 240GWh of solar located in central Australia to get close to a solar powered grid. Still hugely expensive but a fraction of your guesstimate. Average demand is around 23GW. So solar capacity factor just 10%.
“ This is a HIGHLY conservative basis for determining storage requirement.”
Since the stakes are literally life and death here in canada I want as conservative a calculation as possible
You would not rely on the grid if it was a matter of life or death. People who have done that are literally a dying breed.
Even Australian supermarkets now have back-up generators because they suffer big losses when power goes out. Hospitals have had emergency generators for decades as does any life critical service.
I run SOME of my household grid off grid using solar.
But you still rely on the grid to keep your household supplied, evidently. That takes care of the difficult bits.
“……..the people pushing this agenda have no clue. No clue whatsoever.”
Ah, but they do!!! The people at the head of the train here can see that the bridge is out up ahead and are increasing the throttle. They WANT to see the failure of Western governments. It is all part of the Great Reset and necessary for the creation of the New World Order.
I grabbed a few years of daily data from https://www.lowcarboncontracts.uk/data-portal/dataset/actual-cfd-generation-and-avoided-ghg-emissions for their extensive wind and solar farms in the UK, then aggregated each of solar, onshore wind, and offshore wind, to give an average energy each day from each type’s nominal capacity. Over 2 years (2020 and 2021) on average PV produces 2.9 h of nominal power per day, offshore 10 hours, and onshore 6 hours.
Various cross plots revealed that although you do get the most solar on calm days, and you do get dark, windy days, you also get calm dark days and windy sunny days.
I also compared the output of each offshore windfarm, and frankly if one is working then they all are, and if it is calm at one typically it is calm at all. The mantra that the wind is always blowing somewhere is demonstrably false in the UK for days at a time.
Then I used Solver to find an installed capacity for each generator type and battery size to supply 1GW of baseload power, 24/7, with minimum cost and 2 days in 2 years with empty batteries.
So, for installed costs per MW of 8.6e5 for solar, 6.5e6 for offshore wind, 1.6 e6 for onshore wind, and 2e5 per MWh for batteries, the optimum system to replace a 1GW baseload generator would cost 27 billion dollars. It would have 4723 MW nominal power of solar, 230 of offshore wind, and 8367 of onshore wind. This ignores the social cost of onshore windturbines, of course. The batteries would be 42 GWh. So, at least in the UK over 2 years you only need a couple of days backup for the cheapest system. You are of course massively overbuilding the cheap renewables by 1300% to get that battery size down.
If I then reduce the cost of batteries by a factor of 10, ie $20 /kWh, then we need 600% overbuild and 6 days of storage.
The problem I see here is that these numbers are very different to 30 days of storage in the article. They are of course very much affected by the assumptions on cots and the local weather.
48 hours storage capacity at average demand works well. A small amount of dispatchable added to the generation would make that level of storage highly reliable in most locations.
For Australia’s NEM, I get 750GWh of storage and 240GW of solar collectors in central Australia would source the 23GW average demand.
The solar capacity was based on actual measured output from the Broken Hill solar farm while they were still bidding at the floor price so were always dispatched.
Coal plants now always bid a block of energy near the floor price so they force the subsidy farmers to voluntarily curtail once the price is more nagatoive than the subsidy they get. Coal can always recover negative price excursion during evening peaks but not so for solar and often not for wind.
Even a full year of storage didn’t work out well for Tasmania in the early 1960’s drought. 48 hours only carries the system through at most a week of cloudy windless days in late autumn.
But there was no alternative energy source back then. Wind generators actually make economic sense in Tasmania because the hydro system is perched water constrained.
The most economic case right now is no wind or solar. However if access to new fossil fuels resources continues to be curbed and prices continue to rise then there will be an economic case for wind, solar and storage. The lowest cost economic solution will always include some form of dispatchable generation.
If there is 48 hours storage capacity then around the third day without much input it becomes clear that the battery will go flat if it does not get some input. That is the time to start the dispatchable plant but It does not need to have the capacity to run the whole system because it will still get some input from intermittent sources.
It usually takes four days of drizzle for my battery to run flat but the battery can only supply the load for 48 hours without any input. The worst single day I have recorded is 20 minutes of full sunshine equivalent. I need 1 hour of full sunshine in a day to supply the load. So the actual capacity factor for the solar collectors is very low but the economic solution is to overbuild the collection to reduce the battery capacity.
He is assuming something like building all his capacity in the middle of the desert, hoping for a 25% average capacity factor, while using only 10/25ths of the output, and building massive grids over many thousands of miles to distribute it around Australia. So if you think of a number for the cost of solar, multiply by 2.5, and add the cost of the grid and the batteries. It is unclear whether he has looked at hourly demand profiles – he only refers to meeting average demand – or to covering much higher levels of demand in summer heatwaves. etc. or if he has accounted for round trip losses through the storage.
Not sure where you got your costs from. The offshore wind number is on the high side, even as dollars rather than pounds, while solar and batteries are low on a fully installed basis, and you’ve made no allowance for ongoing costs. Still, the key point is that you end up having to jettison as worthless most of the output of the system: a quick calculation suggests that total system output would be about 3GW to produce the 1GW demand, with 2GW curtailed on average: marginal curtailment will be very high indeed. You might also get somewhat different answers if you tried to match an actual hourly demand profile rather than the flat GW. It’s the high demand hours that set the real requirements, during which solar will typically be contributing nothing at all, meanwhile the low demand peiods will lead to more curtailment. Both act to force requirements and costs higher. You also need to check that the minimum you have found is a true minimum, rather than just a local one.
It can be instructive to look at the marginal values of the various components by constraining the solution to 1MW or MWh less capacity in each component in turn, and then re-optimising.
while I say kudos to you for pointing out the difference between gigawatt and gigawatthour, which is so very often used interchangeably in articles written by supposed “experts”, you still have a bit to go in order to express metric units correctly. In metric system, the multiplier “kilo” is ALWAYS written in lowercase (k) and so is hour (h). So the unit kilowatthour is thus written as “kWh”, not KWH as you are writing it. Same goes for gigawatthour “GWh”. Just a thoudht…
DEFR=magic
It’s all taken care of, it will be done because it is directed.
Maybe DEFR is just a way of saying “Nuclear Power Station” without using the dread word.
After all, it is without a doubt an energy source that is dispatchable and emissions free
And that would explain the expression “First allowable year for DEFR builds advanced to 2030″ i.e. by 2030, the powers that be will have realised that it is the only viable solution and will alllow building new ones 🙂
Well it’s not that simple. They model it first and then direct it-
Net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 IS possible without damaging economy (msn.com)
Dontcha know these people have been to university and they have computers.
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…
Don’t think I’ll bother really but here tis in a picture for griff and the numpties-
Wind Energy in Australia | March 2022 | Aneroid
Run your mouse over that graph and you’ll see it gets down to 3.6% of installed nameplate capacity although perhaps the brains trust are working feverishly on gathering moonlight solar.
Meanwhile the storage panacea is at crisis point over a supply chain crunch-
US battery storage industry ‘at crisis point’ over supply chain crunch (energy-storage.news)
It was always their lunar prescriptions that would bring the climate changers undone and only a matter of time now.
and there was no solar power during that time?
DEFR has been invented, it is biomass. They are going to need a heck of a lot of it though.
We know all about those incendiary lithium batteries so forget about the storage-
Delburn wind farm approved with 33 turbines, but no onsite battery storage (msn.com)
They will use the safe chemistry batteries.
I certainly think that sceptics need to concentrate on debunking the amazingly cheap prices being forecast for wind and solar power.
Those quoted prices do not include keeping us supplied with power 24/7 and 365 days per year. That is the big lie which needs to be challenged every time it raises its head.
Photo of Tesla battery array captioned as an oil tanker……
It would be interesting to see a histogram of the energy stored in the two systems.!
Lamenting the lack of solutions won’t help. All it requires is observation and addition skills, plus a basic set of communication skills, which science has proven exist in mere birds.
WHOOOO HOOOO! Go gGet the gold star! You put on your eyeglasses and looked out at reality!
BUT being creative, thoughtful, logical, practical and intelligent WILL solve problems in many cases.
I’m “only” a writer, handyman, researcher, reporter and journalist who has studied the environment for over 40 years.
I recall when scientists appeared to shift gears 30-40 years ago, claiming global warming, then global cooling, then global warming was imminent.
How about this: the International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) proposes full cut-off lighting, which can save multiple billions in the United States by reducing fossil fuel usage for unwanted lighting directed upward into the sky.
WHO ELSE HAVE COME UP WITH POTENTIAL SOLUTIONS LIKE THAT??
All I did was remember my concern with the issue when I joined the organization some thirty years ago. I recall studies noting that billions of dollars and huge amounts of fossil fuels could be saved by installing full cut-off lighting and other dark-sky- and power-saving measures.
YEAH, I RESEARCHED THAT.
And you’re going to see it on a massive scale in the next 20 years.
AND it may be fueled much more quickly than that by the lack of fossil fuels due to supply cut-off arising from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. IF some promint leaders become aware of, and promote it!
The moral of this post, as far as the ignorant rabble who agreed with it because they’re too ignorant to disagree with it, is that you shouldn’t trust people a lot like yourselves tell the truth or limit you from understanding or reaching what may be possible, based on questions that may not have even reached your minds yet!
Perfect description of your post.
You need to bear in mind when fantasizing about climate changing with technology as yet unknown or unproven–
“The clean energy transition cannot be built on dirty mining.”
Joe Biden invokes Defense Production Act for EV batteries and clean energy (msn.com)
Sleepy Joe seems to be all over the shop here and yet he’s supposed to be the man with the plan for changing the weather. Or has he just run smack bang into the reality of which we speak here?
I’ll DEFR to the experts.
😉
Because the driver to this is changing our political system, not energy. They don’t really care about creating a net-zero energy grid, this just is an excuse to exert more and more control over folks lives. They’ll keep delaying the target date for completion as they utilize the interim steps to issue more directives to all the little people. Again, it’s all about control. Even AOC’s chief of staff stated that the ‘Green New Deal’ was about socialism, not environmentalism. (It was also a brilliant strategy to set up a campaign fundraising network independent of the establishment DNC and Nancy Pelosi, allowing them to fund far left progressives as primary challengers as well as their own reelection campaigns. People the DNC/Pelosi would never fund, and the fascist four could ignore threats from Pelosi to withhold funding for their own reelection campaigns.)
Can you flesh out why such a system would need 30 days worth of energy storage? I realize the absolutists want ZERO fossil fuel generation and that is a silly hurdle. However, even 12 hours worth of system storage would seem to allow much higher penetration of intermittent sources and still provide reliability.
Only 12 hours storage to iron this rubbish out!!!
Wind Energy in Australia | December 2021 | Aneroid
Remember while that goes on it can be overcast and pouring cats and dogs and flooding thousands of homes as we’ve seen in Oz.
Concentrate Jason-
This graph depicts performance of wind farms connected to the electricity grid in south-eastern Australia over a month.
The default, capacity factor graph shows the output as a percentage of registered capacity. On average wind farms in south-east Australia operate at a capacity factor of around 30-35%.
....and the average adult human has one large tit and a testicle. How would you like to be averaged out via medical technology or would you be more interested in the marginal status quo?