We are on our way to Net Zero by 2050. It must be true because everybody says so. The entire $6+ trillion per year federal government is committed to the project, which obviously would not be the case if the whole thing were impossible. Equally fully committed are essentially all of the colleges and universities, where all of the smartest people are to be found. As well as every other elite institution of every kind and sort.
Take the World Economic Forum. If there is a number one elitest among all elite institutions, this has to be it. At their annual confab in Davos, Switzerland, they gather the greatest of geniuses to instruct the very top government and business leaders how to run the world. Would you like to go? It will cost you $52,000 to join the organization, and then an additional $19,000 to attend the conference. Chartering a private jet to get you there will cost a few more thousand. Once there, you can hear the very smartest people imparting their thoughts on the most important topics of the day, like “The Great Reset,” “Emerging Technologies,” “Diversity and Inclusions,” and, of course, “The Net Zero Transition.”
Is it possible that these people are completely incompetent and have no idea what they are doing?
A reader has sent me the very latest from the WEF on how the world is going to get to Net Zero. The piece has a date of September 5, 2023, and is titled “How battery energy storage can power us to Net Zero.” The authors are three people from the World Bank, with the lead author being one Amit Jain, who is the Bank’s Energy Storage Program Lead. This is the guy on the receiving end of tens of billions of dollars of government money to pass out to make the energy transition happen throughout the developing world.
Now, it so happens that energy storage is something I know a little about, and in particular about the problem of trying to store enough energy to make an electrical grid work without full dispatchable backup. See my energy storage Report, dated December 1, 2022, at this link.
So let’s take a look at Jain, et al.’s, take on how battery storage will “power us to Net Zero.” First, some excited happy talk:
Across the globe, power systems are experiencing a period of unprecedented change. Low-cost renewable electricity is spreading and there is a growing urgency to boost power system resilience and enhance digitalization. This requires stockpiling renewable energy on a massive scale, notably in developing countries, which makes energy storage fundamental. . . .
Making energy storage systems mainstream in the developing world will be a game changer. Deploying battery energy storage systems will provide more comprehensive access to electricity while enabling much greater use of renewable energy, ultimately helping the world meet its Net Zero decarbonization targets. International organizations and development institutions are leading the way forward to enable this decarbonization. . . .
So OK Amit, how much storage are we talking about here?
In 2022, approximately 192GW (gigawatts) of solar and 75GW of wind were installed globally. However, only 16GW/35GWh (gigawatts per hour) of new storage systems were deployed. A recent International Energy Agencyanalysis finds that although battery energy storage systems have seen strong growth in recent years, grid-scale storage capacity still needs to be scaled up to reach Net Zero Emissions by 2050. . . . To meet our Net Zero ambitions of 2050, annual additions of grid-scale battery energy storage globally must rise to an average of 80 GW annually between now and 2030.
Holy underwear, Batman! Could this guy really not even know what units he’s talking about? Thinking his readers might not understand the abbreviation “GWh” he helpfully defines it as “gigawatts per hour”! Could he really be this clueless? And he had two co-authors to check him!
And then there’s the statement that to meet the 2050 Net Zero ambition, annual deployments of grid-scale batteries “must rise to an average of 80 GW annually.” Of course he is using the wrong units (and undoubtedly does not know that). But let’s give him the benefit of the doubt, and assume that he is talking about the standard batteries available today, which are 4 hour batteries, meaning that 80 GW would provide 320 GWh of storage. If the world would add that much capacity every year from now to 2050, that would come to 8960 GWh of storage. How have Mr. Jain et al. come to the conclusion that this 8960 GWh of storage will be enough to “meet our Net Zero ambitions of 2050”? The piece contains no quantitative analysis or backup of any kind to support the proposition that this amount of storage would be sufficient.
My own energy storage Report does contain backup and calculations, although only for certain countries rather than for the whole world. For example, for the United States, the figures cited in my Report are that it would take some 233,000 GWh of battery storage to fully back up the electrical grid, assuming current levels and patterns of usage. Since the U.S. is about 4% of world population, we can multiply that figure by 25 to get the storage requirement for the world (assuming that the world electrifies to the U.S. level by 2050). The total would be 5,825,000 GWh. In other words, Jain, et al., are off by a factor of about 650, give or take maybe a few hundred.
But it’s OK, because Jain and his colleagues have no skin in this game. They just babble some happy talk to get their hands on a few hundred billions of money from rich governments, and pass it out to build impressive-looking battery projects that are actually next to useless to provide reliable grid electricity. They can be very confident that no one in their circles will ever check the math to see if the numbers add up. When 2050 rolls around and the whole thing doesn’t work, they will be long retired on generous pensions.
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Government and leftist societies are a long running magnet for mediocre people since they are in it for the money nothing more, they really don’t care about Net Zero as long as they can sucker the gullible to give up cash and their personal freedom to line their own bank accounts and buy more property.
To paraphrase Thomas Sowell, it is folly to place decisions in the hands of those who have no consequences for being wrong.
Dr. Nassim Taleb wrote a whole book about that folly: Skin in the Game.
So, we have to make sure that there will be consequences for these lying and manipulating elites!
When this whole Net Zero garbage fails to deliver, we must make sure these carpetbaggers get their due time in court. They have no social license to impoverish the general public by foisting costly unreliable energy on us, so we must ensure their reputations get tarnished and they will no longer be listened to. Every dog will have his day, and I hope ours is coming soon.
Our political system is fundamentally corrupted by convincing people Democracy is about voting. “Representatives from all social classes ruling to the benefit of all social classes” are words I’ve never heard escape the lingual sphincter of any politician or propagandist.
So I came up with this:
https://www.greenpets.co.za/index.php/en/2-greenpets-natural-happiness/316-social-contract
I point you specifically at the clause about personal audits.
Democracy is all about voting. It is about how you vote. Not which party you vote for but whether you vote for any party or an individual. A party representative cannot represent an individual. They already represent not the voter or themselves but the party. They are beholden to the party. This is why you get what you have got. The voter is the cause of this travesty and only the voter can put it right.
….and suddenly I am allowed to reply…
“It is not he who votes, that counts, it is him who counts the votes.”
That quote was from one of the poster boys of fake political participation.
“All political parties are mafia gangs, and your government’s economics policy is your state religion”
That quote was for free.
But feel free to enlighten me on how a purposely diseducated public will vote this all right….
https://stocks.apple.com/AR0m6ytN0TrmmE2HOrvWSIw
Here we go….
Warren Buffett’s energy division has had a negative income tax rate for 5 years straight – as it’s received clean-energy credits worth billions
LINK
He personally stated:
LINK
It has ALWAYS been about the money and build the means of government control to get it any way they can has become more and more brazen while unblinking ignorantly stupid gullible fools for the most part let it all happen while they are planning to vote for a stumbling bumbling unsteadily walking vegetable another 4 years in the padded walls of the WH, my gosh too many Americans are easy to fool these days.
What is worrying, is that these people, who actually sit around deciding where the world is going to next, are purposely building things that costs huge amounts of money, knowing full well it will not serve any number of people.
Do you think it is to “grow the economy” while simply not planning to service large numbers of people,, or do they somehow think there won’t be large numbers of people in ten years’ time?
Another thing these geniuses have never considered is how they are gong to mine all of the raw materials necessary for “unreliables” without using fossil fuel powered machinery. And then there is the processing of the ores…
Oh. And finding enough raw materials to begin with. Because there just simply isn’t enough of some critical materials.
Cobalt and lithium are exhibits 1 and 2. The China monopoly on ‘rare earths’ is not because they are rare (they aren’t in the small quantities needed), but because they are costly to process from ore in an environmentally responsible way. China doesn’t.
Not to mention the child and slave labor used to mine some of these raw materials. Where is the humanity of these people when we really need it?
Yes, and no one accounts for the fact that not a single wind turbine, solar array or battery built and installed in the next 7 years or currently operating will still be functional by 2050 (not including batteries lost in massive fires). In fact the entire energy generating and storage system will have to be rebuilt between 2030 and 2050 and about 10% of it will need to be replaced every year there after. Oh, and by 2050 it will all have to be done without using coal, oil or natural gas.
MC has hit the nail squarely on the head – these net-zero proponents have net-zero competence.
What machinery? We are about to beflooded by miscreants with low social credit scores. Remembered how Biden promised us Green Jobs? Just look how carbon-free the children in the Congo are doing it, and leeeaaarrrrnnnn….
Two observations.
First, if ‘low cost renewables are spreading’ then how come everywhere that’s true electricity prices have been rising sharply? CA, UK, Germany. Proof that high cost renewables are spreading in some irrational places.
Second, if the CPUC was making this GW versus GWh storage mistake back in 2013, surely the less technical World Bank is entitled to make it now. (/s) Except, CPUC was ‘paid’ to make the mistake by Silicon Valley VC’s who knew their storage startup investments might make CPUC GW storage targets but NEVER GWh targets. Follow the CA VC lobbying money. Covered with illustrations in essay California Dreaming in ebook Blowing Smoke.
With experts like Mr. Amit Jain, the World Bank has clearly outlived its usefulness. Their huge building in Washington DC should be immediately used to house the homeless.
Rud, and Third, Batteries do not store AC power only DC. So with wind power input with AC, they need to convert to DC to store in the battery. Solar, if the panels are close enough to the Battery Storage, would only have one conversion.
All the Battery Storage has to convert back to AC to feed the electrical system.
Cost – Most inverters on the market today have an efficiency of around 75-80%. x 2 would be 56% to 65%.
Gonna need a bigger Wind Farm and Solar plant.
Oh, the numbers work IF you reduce the population enough. Which I have reluctantly concluded is their true goal.
Depends on which population. Prosperous West, yes. Africa and Asia outside Japan, no. And Japan seems to be doing the long term population reduction thing on itself voluntarily without ‘climate solution’ help.
Rud,
The Optimum Trust, now Population Matters, whose patron saint is David Attenborough accidentally released a spreadsheet showing where population was to be culled.
It wasn’t white societies, it was all those funny little brown and yellow-skinned people.
The spreadsheet can still be found on archive.org
I believe so stated by bill gates.
A Tesla auto battery holds 100kWh. It would take 1000 of these to get 1GWh and 233,000,000 of them to supply enough batteries for just the US. I found one battery on e-bay and the asking price was $20,000 US. A measly $4,660,000,000,000, just for the US’s 4% of world population.
I wonder how long it will take to build 233,000,000?
According to Tesla’s data, they built 497,700 batteries in the last quarter. Let’s be generous and round up to 500,000, just to make the math easier.
So that’s 2,000,000 batteries in a year. At this rate it would take 116.5 years to build all the batteries needed for just the US, and that doesn’t leave any batteries left over for making any actual Tesla cars.
The other big problem is that you will be lucky to get more than 5 to 10 years out of those batteries. After about 7 years, all of your production will be needed just to replace the batteries that are wearing out.
Well, math never was the strong suit of any climate “scientist”, let alone a climate bureaucrat. Their degrees are in Elbonian gender studies or the history of Slobovian art in the middle ages.
“ A Tesla auto battery holds 100kWh. It would take 1000 of these to get 1GWh and 233,000,000 of them to supply enough batteries for just the US”
Nope, that’d be 10,000 required, 10 to get to Megawatt hours, and 1000 time more for Gigawatt hours.
The most common Tesla sold has a 56kWh battery and a 90% round trip efficiency, so it’s more like 20,000 batteries for a GWh of storage.
200 million 50 kwh batteries for 4 days U.S, “average”: consumption rate, but let’s not quibble about numbers. Battery storage for more than 12 hours is not an option so the wind and solar alternative to conventional is not an option. Next question please this really is “settled science”,
In the UK, our gov’t has removed planning restrictions to build onshore wind farms. Which got me musing about the scale of the project.
To replace our current energy needs with wind, would require around 130,000 turbines (near me there is a farm of turbines, each producing about 2MW installed capacity).
To build the necessary turbines, between now and 2050, would require about 5000 turbines/yr.
By the time they got to year 20 in the project, that first batch would need replacing. (Having watched our local farm being replaced, which took around two years.)
So at year 20, they’d lose 5000 turbines, as they build 5000, the following year the same again.
No matter how many they build each year, that replacement cycle will kill further development. Unless they can build over 6-7000 each year.
Renewable energy isn’t sustainable.
But they are not interested in that. Wind turbines are the prayer wheels of the faithful, and they spin the money into the high priests back pockets.
Who cares if the world collapses? As long as they are still in charge.
The 233,000 GWh number seems very low. US electricity consumption is ~4000 TWh a year = 4000000 GWh, thus 233000 GWh is only 21 days of storage out of 365.
You do not need 100% backup, but 5% backup seems ridiculously low given that Europe has had 30%+ shortfalls in wind, at continent scales, for 3 months or more, twice, in just the past 5 years.
There are also large seasonal variations, regional consumption pattern differences, losses and throughput limitations transferring power between regional grids and certainly a host of other issues including having a reserve against breakdowns/emergencies/demand spikes. It would not shock me that a realistic amount of storage to account for real world reliability would require over 10% backup given 100% intermittent generation only aka Net Zero.
I haven’t ever connected to the computer chat program ….
But, I have read a bunch of stuff it has produced.
It appears that Amit Jain utilized the Chat program to create most of the text in “How battery energy storage can power us to Net Zero.” that is referenced in this story.
(Is there yet, an AI comparison model that can accurately ‘guess’ if text has been created by a typical ‘AI’ like ChatGPT)
Looking back through history, the bien pensant opinion feeds on itself. they cannot be seen to be wrong, and no amount of deaths will stop them.
They lost me at ‘low cost’.
You’re not the only one-
What went wrong at UK government’s offshore wind auction? (msn.com)
They really haven’t got a clue except for more helicopter money and slushfunding.
They mean low cost to them 🙂
They are the very model of modern major modellers-
How scientists are modelling an ‘alternative universe’ to understand climate change’s impact on extreme weather (msn.com)
They’re in an alternative universe to we mere earthlings.
They have obviously given up after their utter failure to model anything real about climate.
So they now change their aim to something totally imaginary.
It is all just a LOW-LEVEL form of computer gaming.
… and they haven’t ever got past the “Pong” stage.
The net 0 folks do not understand the concept of scale.
I could tell one of them that I can work for 4 hours having consumed a chocolate bar and a cola drink. To their thinking, given 1,000 drinks and chocolate bars, I could work for 4,000 hours or just under half a year. It is not the math that is bad, it is the concept.
Many folks have trouble with the concepts of compounding and scale.
At my workplace we say, “you can get 9 women pregnant, but that doesn’t mean you’ll get a baby in a month.”
This was an excellent article! Like the author, I’ve suspected for a long time now that the elites have no idea what they are doing. That as a group they are simply incompetent.
That’s a scary thought. But it makes sense. Look at Ford Motor Company for example wasting billions making electric cars that their customers don’t want. Look at the Disney Corporation for example systematically wrecking a billion-dollar brand. Look at an elitist advertising agency and corporate management at Anheuser Busch ignorantly destroying the Bud Light brand.
What we need is a new elite. An elite with some common sense. But how do you do that?
Heh – take away what makes them an ‘elite’ and give it to someone else! Use the UN/WEF etc ideas against them – they want to transfer wealth from the West to other countries? Fine – let it be the ‘elites’ wealth then.
It happens to every civilisation, it becomes too complex for the sort of idiots who want to be in charge of it, to manage.
And it collapses. And with goes the ‘B’ ark and all the telephone sanitisers:
Roll on the mutant start goats ,I say.
Some other society that is rougher and rawer and more pragmatic then takes it over.
China probably.
I read a similar sci-fi story where the world was filled with useless, ignorant people. Their solution was to sell vacations to Venus. People dumb enough to think that they could vacation on Venus were too dumb to provide useful contributions to society. They loaded up spaceships that went into space to never return.
I understand there was a similar push to colonize Mars and a large number of people signed up. Bless their hearts.
That was probably “The Marching Morons”, by Cyril Kornbluth.
Don’t forget what happened to the Golafrinchans due to a lack of telephone sanitisers.
It’s a top down problem. If you have rubbish at the top you sure are going to have rubbish all the way down. The rubbish at the top are created and installed by the voters. Fools that they are.
“Is it possible that these people are completely incompetent and have no idea what they are doing?”
For some, that’s certainly the case. But many know exactly what they’re doing; it’s by design. They’ve admitted it.
See my first post today, yes they think they know what they ware doing at one level, but the effect their actions are having at another passes them by completely, with the whooshing sound of a Storm Shadow heading for their parliaments and careers..
Certainly, the UN know what they are about in the global political sense, they are just using the
modern environmental religion about human induced climate change, to reallocate western wealth to developing countries, as a form of compensation for the supposed ills of modern industrialized civilization. In organizing this process, they take power from accenting nations, towards building their idealized socialist world government. The west has fallen for this nonsense, because leftist elites either agree with the ultimate aim, or the environmental cause in general.
It is up to us rational thinkers, and people trained in the scientific method to show that the UN climate science is wrong, humans are not unthinkingly polluting the planet, or causing unusual climate change. Natural factors dominate here as in the past, and no amount of computer models can trump validated observations as to what occurred historically and what is actually happening now in climate matters. We have had enough of data manipulation and statistical correctness to last a lifetime already, it’s time to pull the plug on this climate madness, to save our sanity if nothing else.
I don’t believe they are actually reallocating western wealth to developing countries.
I think they are reallocating wealth from the average citizen in western countries to “elites” that are poised to subjugate developing countries’ citizens.
Example: China’s Belt and Road.
It is all a power play bought and paid for with taxpayer money so the “elites” don’t have to spend their own money yet reap the power and control.
Leftists crave power to control other people’s lives and deaths.
There is no proof that man made CO2 is causing any global warming. Governments in USA and Europe are forcing gigantic increases in electric power costs and vehicle costs as well as social costs – all for nothing…..it will be one of the greatest man made disasters besides wars.
Yes, but it leads to transfer of an awful lot of money from the poor to the ultra-rich. Result!
Virtue signalling.
To appreciate the magnitude of the storage problem you might consider that the biggest “battery” in the UK is the pumped storage facility at Dinorwig in North Wales.
When fully “charged” it can generate 1.8 GW for six hours (11 GW hours).
The UK National Grid uses on average roughly 30 GW (720 GW hours per day) so you would need more than 60 Dinorwigs to store enough electricity to keep us going for 24 hours – almost 500 to see us through a quiet week like the one we are presently experiencing.
Some idiot engineers talk about gravity storage, hoisting heavy weights up and down towers so here is a feasibility scheme using the Empire state Building as a weight and a large elevator to transport it up and down Mt Everest. Tricky engineering I know but all in a day’s work to a WEF NetZero engineer
Mass of Empire State Building 331,000,000 Kg (= about 300,000 Tons )
height of Mt Everest 8849 M
Energy in GWhrs 8.1 Call this unit of energy 1 EverestEmpire
Uk 2050 power requirement in 200 GW
Energy storage requirement for 1 week of backup in GWhrs =33600
How many Everest Empires for 1 week UK backup 4,130 Simples!
Real engineers do calculations and cost estimates on the options, cost being a measure of human effort…So you won’t find a real engineer that is keen on gravity energy storage by lifting weights, with the exception of pumped hydro when bodies of water of appropriate elevations exist, and maybe grandfather clocks before quartz movements were invented.
Wrong, they know exactly what they’re doing. One way to destroy Capitalism is to remove the energy/chemicals required to support manufacturing and agriculture. The Netherlands agriculture? Germany manufacturers shortage and cost of electricity?
To assume that they have no idea what they are doing presupposes that their actual intention is their publicly stated intention.
From what I’ve seen, they know well what they are doing, it’s just that their actual goal is to destroy the entry infrastructure of Western countries while simultaneously bankrupting them through white elephant protects eventually resulting in a global collapse and famine that will result in billions of deaths. The real people behind this have been diligently working towards this goal for decades.
sadly I find it difficult to refute your logic
In short, their aim is fully consistent with the goals of Marxism.
I vote for our leading institutions to be run by chimpanzees. They would do a much better job than these halfwits at the World bank. To call this garbage total scientific and economic illiteracy does not even begin to describe their vapid Kamala-esque maunderings
We could always just use the widely available, cheap and easy to use fossil fuels. Added bonus is that they are their own storage system. Bolt on some nuclear and we are good to go.
Hmm, that’s a rather radical, out-of-the-box suggestion. As they used to say in old sci-fi films, it just might work.
Ah, it’s a long shot, but y’know it just might!
Using the 233,000 Gwh for America as an example, this also requires, neglecting losses, 233,000Gwh of excess generation to recharge those batteries and at the correct time. Excess is not useful if the batteries are fully charged and vice versa.
I have no idea of the actual excess renewable generation in America but I suspect strongly that keeping the batteries charged as required is as impossible as actually installing them?
I’m not entirely sure I understand Mr. Menton’s math. If the U.S. consumes 3,805,874 GWh in a year, then his 233,000 GWh is over three weeks’ average energy use. Right? Did I do the math right? If so, that seems like a lot.
I hasten to add that three weeks would probably be in the ballpark if there were to be no overbuilding; my estimate based on ERCOT wind-only records was something in excess of five weeks (which combining with solar with the wind would reduce somewhat).
But a cost-optimal system would be overbuilt, and overbuilding would greatly reduce storage requirements. My estimate for 120% overbuilding was only a little over three days–and that was for wind-only in the air-conditioning-intensive ERCOT market.
Or am I missing something?
Overbuilding is one way to increase the average availability of electricity from overall wind installations, but the operative word is average.
The whole problem with intermittents is because they are not reliable. So not only do you fundamentally have to build 3 units of solar or 2 units of wind to replace 1 unit of fossil fuel/nuclear – additional multipliers are needed to offset the variability at minute, hour, day, week, month and even seasonal levels. And even then, there are continent scale variability: Europe has had its collective wind production be 30% below “models” over 3 month plus intervals, twice, in the past 5 years.
The model you see above is pure mathematical exercise and bears zero resemblence to reality – look at actual wind production profiles vs. demand profiles to get a better idea of what kind of overbuild would be necessary to reduce the intermittency problem. And I say reduce, because no amount of overbuild will remove it. 4x or 5x might get you to around 90%, but then you have the problem of 400% to 500% more electricity being produced in periods where nobody wants it (the duck curve).
This is a huge problem because it costs money to get rid of massive amounts of excess electricity. Texas spends $200M a year to get rid of 12 million+ megawatt-hours of excess electricity = ~4% of renewable production; they are only producing about 30% of electricity from renewables right now. I am actively talking with a company that owns utilities in Spain and Portugal; those countries are roughly 47% net renewable generation so I am very interested to see how much they are curtailing.
Note that in Texas, for example, a major structural issue is that the wind tends to blow around midnight – which is an extremely low demand time of day. So a significant part of the curtailment is the wind generating more electricity, already, than anyone wants in the middle of the night. Overbuilding to 100% renewable electricity production will only multiple this over-generation.
Thanks for the input. However, I’m puzzled. You say:
But the results my graph above depicts were in fact based on “actual wind production profiles vs. demand profiles” in Texas. The graph nearby, for example, illustrates the hour-by-hour storage in which a year’s ERCOT consumption record and a year’s ERCOT wind record scaled up only to the average consumption would result (if there’s no storage loss, transmission capacity is adequate, the lark’s on the wing, etc., etc.).
Again, thanks for the input, but I’m afraid nothing in your comment gives me much reason to believe that at any plausible battery price a significant degree of overbuilding wouldn’t be the most-likely scenario if thermal plants (and hydro) were to be eliminated completely.
Fundamentally, in the sense in which you mean it, yes.
These are ArtStudents™ and Marxists, and the only thing that concerns them is what people believe.
They have probably all either done years in politics, philosophy, and economics, or AgitProp, which is applied Marxism really.
“Philosophy is a dangerous tool, if the philosopher is a fool”.
I.e. check out Rupert Read, the “Philosopher of Climate Change.”
For these people, reality does not really exist, they live in a world of human narratives, and power and fame and approbation come to the one spinning the most effective narrative. There is no truth, to them there is only what people believe it to be, and they are in charge of controlling those beliefs, the high priests of the Green religion.
Remember the old adage, Reality is for people who cannot handle drugs, and politics is for people who cannot handle reality.
Like The Bandar Log, they all say it, so it must be true. It is not a question of building a net zero society, it is a question of convincing enough voters that they are.
And the future will take care of itself. I mean who, with a decent degree in a STEM subject would want to become a politician or a civil servant?