It’s been obvious for many years that electricity generation from the intermittent wind and sun would never work to power a modern economy. But how would the infeasibility of the proposed energy transition finally manifest itself to put an end to the madness?
A couple of years ago I began writing about the the upcoming “Renewable Energy Wall,” for example in this piece from December 2021 titled “Which Country Or U.S. State Will Be The First To Hit The Renewable Energy Wall?” I called for readers to place their bets as to which among various jurisdictions would be the first to recognize that it could never achieve the net zero goal. But what would be the aspects of reality that would put an end to further renewable development? Would it be the soaring costs? Or perhaps the spreading blackouts? Or maybe the voters wising up? Or maybe other things that nobody had yet guessed?
Over the past few weeks and months, several parts of the coming Green Energy Wall have started to come into focus. The two factors that are emerging most significantly at this early stage are (1) voters starting to catch on, and (2) the inability of wind and solar developers to deliver projects at costs that are at all workable for consumers.
In the voter category, many places, particularly in Europe, have long had an all-party political consensus in favor of “climate action,” or some such nonsensical slogan, thus making it almost impossible for citizens to use their vote to push for any kind of sensible energy policies. But suddenly that is changing. First we had Argentina a week ago electing as President an avowed climate skeptic, Javier Milei. And then on Wednesday, the Netherlands followed suit, giving the biggest bloc of seats in its Parliament to the party of another avowed climate skeptic, Geert Wilders. Wilders’s Freedom Party delivered a drubbing to both the “center right” party of the current Prime Minister Mark Rutte, as well as to a Labor/Green coalition headed by Frans Timmermans, who is the European Commission’s Vice President and a face for the EU’s noxious climate agenda.
Euro News today has some quotes from the manifesto of the Freedom Party:
[T]he PVV manifesto . . . declares: “We have been made to fear climate change for decades… We must stop being afraid.” “The climate is always changing, for centuries,” the document goes on to say. “When conditions change we adapt. We do this through sensible water management, by raising dykes when necessary and by making room for the river. But we stop the hysterical reduction of CO2, with which, as a small country, we wrongly think we can “save” the climate.” The manifesto also calls for more oil and gas extraction from the North Sea and keeping coal and gas power stations open.
Further as to the Dutch election, here is a November 23 piece from Spiked by Fraser Myers, headlined “The Humiliation of the Dutch Establishment.” Myers makes the point that green hair-shirt energy policies have now finally made climate skepticism a winning electoral position in Europe. Excerpt:
The failure of Timmermans . . . shows that opposition to climate policy is now a significant driver of European populism. After all, as Commission vice-president, Timmermans was the face of Brussels’s stringent climate policies, including the so-called European Green Deal. The EU’s green austerity played a major role in stoking the farmers’ protests that have erupted in the Netherlands over the past few years. . . . And it’s not just agriculture that could be flattened by climate policy. As a Politicoprofile of Timmermans this week notes, the much-vaunted European Green Deal could be about to set off a wave of deindustrialisation – on a scale not seen for 50 years. Politicians who think they can get away with impoverishing their citizens, while hiding behind waffle about Net Zero, are in for a very rude awakening.
Neither Milei’s victory, nor Wilders’s, by itself means that anti-fossil fuel policies are going to disappear overnight in either country. Each of those men has far from a majority in the legislature, meaning that it will take the support of other parties to make great progress against the Green Blob. However, the process has begun.
And meanwhile the march to “green” energy, after years of uncontradicted hype, is now experiencing one reverse after another. It turns out that there are limits to how much governments can achieve by trying to hide the costs of wind and solar energy through various subsidies and tax credits. At some point, after pocketing all the subsidies and credits, the developers still must deliver power to the grid at an affordable cost; and if they can’t, they will go broke.
Just a couple of weeks ago I had a post titled “As The Transition To Green Energy Crumbles, Funding For The Climate Scare Soars.” That post had a round-up of data points in the ongoing failure of green energy to replace fossil fuels. The data points included: proposed massive off-shore wind farms off New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Rhode Island suddenly canceled; stock prices of wind developers cratering as they can’t complete projects for agreed prices; major de-industrialization in Germany due to soaring energy prices. And the bad news for wind and solar energy, and for the “ESG” investing to fund it, only continues to get worse.
From the Wall Street Journal, November 19, “Wall Street’s ESG Craze Is Fading.” Excerpt:
Wall Street rushed to embrace sustainable investing just a few years ago. Now it is quietly closing funds or scrubbing their names after disappointing returns that have investors cashing out billions. . . . The third quarter was the first time more sustainable funds liquidated or removed ESG criteria from their investment practices than were added, according to Morningstar.
They provide this chart of the reversal of fortunes for these so-called “sustainable” funds:
Without private investors, the wind and solar future becomes 100% dependent on government handouts. At some point, those can’t continue either.
And from Canada’s Financial Post, November 17, by venture capital investor Henry Geraedts, “Net-zero policies colliding with economic reality.” Excerpt:
Renewables aren’t reliable and many companies are discovering they don’t pay for themselves even with unsustainably high subsidies. . . . The inconvenient truth is that the clean energy transition is not unfolding as foretold. Three decades and trillions of dollars in subsidies later, wind and solar still represent single-digit percentages of global energy demand, which continues to grow. . . . Our governments holding forth sanctimoniously about imagined climate-driven severe weather events while imposing large-scale use of wind and solar is insanity with serious consequences.
The best thing to end the wind/solar craziness will be to have one or two jurisdictions fail spectacularly as a lesson to everyone else. I wouldn’t have wanted my own New York to volunteer for that role, but that may be what’s happening.
Central planning done by tech and economic innumerates.
Motto: “Well, it looked good on paper.”
We will do it the right way, next time.
The whole cabal should be keel-hauled over and over again, to compensate for the damage it has done.
The price of battery-grade lithium carbonate has crashed in the last 12 months.
This downward pressure is attributed to oversupplied markets in Asia, primarily because the demand of electric vehicles has significantly decreased, due to:
1) high cost of financing (monthly payments),
2) high cost of insurance (3 to 4 times gasoline),
3) stagnant spendable real incomes,
4) lack of driving range, and
5) charging time drawbacks, especially when going on longer trips, having 2 or 3 passengers, hauling loads, driving uphill, all of which are a lot worse in areas with colder climates.
Also, EVs in urban/suburban areas travel less, say 8000 to 9000 miles/y, so the cost/mile is very high
Also, the upstream CO2 of mining, transport, refining materials and building an EV is so high, the little annual travel does not offset the upstream CO2, which means EVs do not reduce CO2 on a lifetime basis.
Also, the life of an EV battery, after 8 x 9000 = 72,000 miles of driving, is about 8 years. No one with any sense would replace an aged battery in an 8-y-old vehicle, at a total cost of $15,000 to $20,000
Since November 2022, the average price of battery-grade lithium carbonate in China plunged from $84,500 per metric ton to $18,630, or about a 78% decline.
?itok=gg3UujvF
Ford, GM, etc., are curtailing/not expanding EV battery plants
That means fewer EV batteries will be built and fewer EVs will be sold during at least 2024/2025, and likely longer.
Government climate goals will not be achieved, unless subsidies are so high, that EVs, plus chargers all over the US, would be “for free”, and the US would be bankrupt.
.
.
According to forecasts from industry consultancy Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, the global lithium market won’t rebalance and return to a deficit until 2028.
General Motors, Honda, LG Energy Solution, and other auto and battery manufacturers have reduced EV manufacturing expansion plans in recent months
This has created a global supply glut for various battery metals.
Bloomberg-NEF’s Allan Ray Restauro said, “With present lithium, etc., supply, and waning EV demand in 2024/2025, we are likely going to see materials prices falling further.
The world’s second-largest lithium producer, Chilean miner SQM, recently blamed the plunge in lithium prices on excess inventory, especially in Asia.
Plunging prices come as the ‘green’ Wind/Solar/Battery/EV/Heat pump bubble is melting down/hitting the wall.
The world’s largest offshore wind farm developer, Oersted A/S, has abandoned several offshore wind projects, and orders for new solar systems and battery systems have dried up. See below articles
BATTERY SYSTEM CAPITAL COSTS, OPERATING COSTS, ENERGY LOSSES, AND AGING
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/battery-system-capital-costs-losses-and-aging
US/UK 66,000 MW OF OFFSHORE WIND BY 2030; AN EXPENSIVE FANTASY
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/biden-30-000-mw-of-offshore-wind-systems-by-2030-a-total-fantasy
World’s Largest Offshore Wind System Developer Abandons Two Major US Projects as Wind Bust Continues
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/world-s-largest-offshore-wind-system-developer-abandons-two-major
The answer is Plasmoids, LENR and the Thunderstorm Generator.
Randall Carlson: “We’re Creating INFINITE Clean Energy” with Plasmoid Technology
https://youtu.be/D5qJK0Nzw2I?t=79
The answer is hemorrhoids, they outnumber politicians in congress 5 to 1. And they know much more than politicians too
The ratio of asshole to politician is 1:1.
Can you have 5 hemorrhoids per asshole ?
Cold Fusion will be a thing when Congress displays human intelligence… At least 10 years from now
Try never
Don’t you mean the perpetual forty years to commercialization, traditionally cited for all fusion boondoggles?
It will be in the year 2360. Some guys living on Mars will invent it.
I thought it was 30 yrs….
Will the lightning’s energy be transmitted by Bluetooth or WIFI?
Or maybe UHF or VHF?
Ludicrous Speed LiFi
I can buy that the tech could boost efficiency and thus reduce emissions of CO and hydrocarbons, but infinite clean energy? No.
A perspective about Australia that appeared in Nature,
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41612-023-00507-y
And that is only about compound events.
The government has already addressed and solved these issues.
They call it “Demand Management”.
(1984 newspeak for turning off grid power feeds whenever wind dies at night times)
Mr. Yes, much more woke than load shedding.
Mr.
“Demand management” also appears in the BloombergNEF
produced report “New Energy Outlook 2022″ as”demend-side efficiency”.
Presumably this means the elites will convince [ie demand] us Prols to no longer
use as much energy . Helpfully they will tell us how much we can use, likely based on the
capacity of the renewable energy sourced grid that they have constructed.
Say, the current electricity usage of a Haitian citizen.
Remember: You will own nothing, and by happy! Cheers! [LOL]
From the Abstract: “We find that compound solar and wind droughts occur most frequently in winter, affecting at least five significant energy-producing regions simultaneously on 10% of days.”
That chart in the article – Sustainable Fund Flows – shows a lot more funds flowing in over the years than have flowed out. But don’t expect any kind of symmetry. If the funds have been losing money then there might not be much more to flow out. To get a fuller picture you need to see the market value of the funds too, and to get the fullest picture you need to see expectations related to reality (not something that can be done until it’s too late).
On the same(!) topic, I see that Joe Biden is promising to destroy the coal industry internationally, not just in the USA. I doubt he can do it. Given the investment choice of green energy or coal, my money would be in coal. Disclosure: It is (again).
Nobody said the funds have been drained dry.
The critical thing is that investors are no longer investing in so called clean energy funds and have in fact begun withdrawing the funds they have invested.
Now is the time to really get to work. We have to double down on informing the regular guy how badly he has been lied to, cheated and abused. The Covid mess showed us first hand that government is not suited for solving those kinds of problems now we are seeing first hand that government is not suited for dealing with energy either.
In Sweden, COVID was treated as a flue. No Pelosi advocated injections, scare mongering, coddling of pharma companies, and $trillion helicoptering of printed money.
Guess what? It worked
In India, a decades-old drug, ivermectin, was used with great success, and at much LOWER COST
The governments of China and Japan seemed to do well using masks and vaccinations with COVID-19.
Their death rates are far below that of the US.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
Did your “study” adjust for the lying liar that is China?
Did your study adjust for the monolithic nature of Japan’s population and for other health variables like diabetes and obesity?
Did your study adjust for large monetary incentives in the US to call an illness or death due to the China virus, even when it was a motorcycle accident?
Oh, you just threw out some “statistic” without any “study”.
AND in the US no study of the above questions will be funded by the US government since it will show the deficiencies of the US government response.
Funny. At the beginning of the “crisis” Musk sent California hundreds of devices made to increase air pressure in the lungs of covid patients when “ventilators” were wanted by the “medical” professionals. They were rejected. He was ridiculed in the media. It has been shown that the devices Musk provided worked better then ventilators and ventilating patients greatly decreased as a treatment.
Where is the study for that?
Yes the US response to the virus was a joke, BUT contrary to the premise of your post, the US MOSTLY did requires masking and MRS therapy (it is not and never has been a vaccine, except J&J, which only needed ONE shot and was quickly phased out since there was no money to be made from continued repeated shots)
BTW, myself, 65 at the time, diabetic, knew in advance I would be exposed to covid so started taking Hydroxychloroquine in advance. Got the China Virus ONCE, did have a nuisance cough for about 5 or 6 days, sort of like an annoying flue, and never got it again. No lingering effects. No lung damage. We traveled across the US for 6 weeks during the height of the panic. It was nice to visit some SMALL towns where the locals were not all masked up and no one appeared sick. East coast highway rest areas were open and operating with mask mandates but we know the masks did nothing.
How many times has Brandon been vaccinated? How many times has he gotten the virus? Many is the answer to both those questions.
Anecdotal. Friends were doing a European tour. They were required to get a current MRNa therapy. They did so and shortly thereafter one of them got the virus. Lucky for them they had paid the insurance, and have been reimbursed for the tour they could not go on and added expense to fly home on an unscheduled time. It has been shown that the therapy destroys any immunity for up to 15 days after the stick. Brilliant!
“Now is the time to really get to work. We have to double down on informing the regular guy how badly he has been lied to, cheated and abused.”
This certainly is the case in Canada.
Were there infiltrators within, acting as government agents who controlled the politicians and media? Who will investigate?
Let’s not forget other reversals: Italy, New Zealand, Slovakia and longer term holdout Hungary. Note also that UK has perforce watered down some Net Zero plans and a more serious walk back is clearly in the cards there. Germany hit the wall and Scholz was desperately into global seller’s gas spot market pushing sky high prices even higher and bulldozing a windfarm over to expand a coalfield!
The fact of the EU peak renewables having been reached in 2017 is buried in obfuscatory “statistics” (47 GW of wind had been decommissioned in 2018 at a time when EU installation companies had begun to go into bankruptcy and private investment backed off). A fact of life is that installed windmills lose 1-2% of their true output capacity each year, and most last 15 -20 years, not the 25yrs listed in their brochures. The stats aren’t adjusted to reflect real capacity. Moreover, they hoodwink the innumerate plebes with ‘cumulative’ capacity installed to make it look like renewables are growing.
It’s safe to say they have already hit the “green” energy wall.
Then explain to the “innumerate plebes” why TWh generated also grow – or do renewables produce more TWh per installed GW as they age?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by-source?country=~OWID_EU27
But it seems like we have hit peak fossil in electricity in 2006 with 2468 TWH and a share of 84%.
And look at the mess and the COST of electricity in the EU.
Wind and solar manufacturers going broke and insolvent
The whole world data, of course, shows a very different story.
KING COAL & QUEEN GAS. !
Plenty of lovely life-giving CO2 for everyone, even if the EU refused to contribute because of political, economic and scientific stupidity.
None of this has anything to do with
“The fact of the EU peak renewables having been reached in 2017…
…Moreover, they hoodwink the innumerate plebes with ‘cumulative’ capacity installed to make it look like renewables are growing.”
from Gary that I replied to.
But thanks for showing that wind and solar are the fastest growing energy sources while coal and gas seem to reach their peak.
https://www.iea.org/reports/renewable-energy-market-update-june-2023/how-much-money-are-european-consumers-saving-thanks-to-renewables
It is quite likely that coal and gas will see a growth spurt as installed renewables reach their depreciation life and are de-commissioned with no new renewable investment to replace them. I would also point out that statistics must be normalized in order to provide a proper comparison. Going from 1 to 2 is a 100% growth. Going from 100 to 101 is only a 1% change. Yet both represent the same investment in new capital (at least to a first approximation). Growth in coal and gas can eclipse that in renewables while still remaining a small percentage because of installed capacity.
According to the IEA’s ‘Energy Technologies Perspectives 2033’
“Oil is the single largest source of primary energy (29%), followed by coal (26%) natural gas (23%) (nuclear (5%), solar & wind (2%), hydro (2%)
Do you know that demand and production of electricity itself has been declining in the aggregate because of “unsustainable” prices for home and industry. IIndustry’s closing plants. Had they been able to obtain enough natural gas on the market, it would have been reflected in statistics as a big jump. Had they not sabotaged Russian pipeline, ditto.They are burning more coal now than they did in the last several years. Why is that?
They have to hit, hit, hit the GREEN WALL, until it crumbles to dust
The UK governments – current and future – are still fully committed to destroying our economy and lifestyle. There was some tiny tinkering that still left fines for manufacturers who fail to meet sales targets for battery cars and heat pumps in place. And having held an auction for windmills at a price that matched what the industry claimed was the current price at got no offers, the government has promptly increased the price that can be screwed out of the customers. So much for wind being 9 times cheaper than reliable gas generation that doesn’t increase grid costs.
The author reports, “the much-vaunted European Green Deal could be about to set off a wave of deindustrialisation” – on a scale not seen for 50 years. But the reality is the USA and EU/UK has for 50 years been deindustrializing to save energy and reduce emissions. We’ve been wildly successful. China and India will never surrender what they’ve been given. It’s already a done deal. They have the jobs, taxbase and profits, we have made in China virtue signaling flags, under employment, unsustainable national debt, and high inflation. uh raw.
They don’t have to surrender it. If the US and Europe would stop sabotaging themselves, we could win back much of it on our own.
That happens after the green wall is dust
AI looks like it is going to take a lot of jobs, everywhere.
More jobs than have already been lost as the industries have moved to countries with reliable and affordable energy?
I can add a third that is coming into clearer view in Australia.
Attached is extracted from the AEMO Q3 2023 report. It shows that 203MW of wind capacity was added year to year to achieved a net REDUCTION in wind generation averaging 9MW.
Most of the reduction is from increased competition from the new entrants but there is increased economic “offloading” mainly due to more rooftop solar that has no market signals and is still getting subsidised so remains the fastest growing market segment. Solar systems in Australia can give households a payback in 3 to 4 years, although they are increasingly pushing street voltage into the limit voltage so are backing off. Again, it is a situation of diminishing returns as the lunchtime generation becomes saturated. On 16th September, South Australia had 100% of its wholesale demand met by rooftops meaning export to Victoria was the only thing keeping the grid stable.:
https://aemo.com.au/-/media/files/major-publications/qed/2023/qed-q3-2023-report.pdf
The Australian government have now declared they will underwrite 38GW of new wind capacity. But adding more wind capacity is like trying to push on string. You do not move much.
Without a substantial increase in storage, there is no market for more wind generation. And the TBM Florence has still only done 150m of its 15km tunnel in two years of service.
“Which Country Or U.S. State Will Be The First To Hit The Renewable Energy Wall?” That’s a tough one to answer. I hope it happens to several in a short timescale. The message then will really hit home about the green deception and the lunacy of Nut Zero.
Germany did several years ago
It has been using nearby grids for support when total wind/solar is insufficient and when it is too much compared to demand
Bang into focus near Brum of all places – = site of the haha National Exhibition Centre
(Now sponsored by Starbucks none other)
“”Inside Britain’s biggest EV hub…where electric car drivers say charging is a nightmare and costs MORE than fuel
link
Yup, they’re making an exhibition alright…
The best thing to end the wind/solar craziness will be to have one or two jurisdictions fail spectacularly as a lesson to everyone else. I wouldn’t have wanted my own New York to volunteer for that role, but that may be what’s happening.
The UK is a leading candidate also. From January 2024 22% of cars sold new must be EVs. On every one over the limit the manufacturer pays a 15,000 fine. This percentage rises every year:
2024: 22% of new car sales electric
2025: 28%
2026: 33%
2027: 38%
2028: 52%
2029: 66%
2030: 80%
2031: 84%
2032: 88%
2033: 92%
2034: 96%
2035: 100%
https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/electriccars/article-12545349/Car-firms-forced-sell-electric-vehicles-mandate.html
At the same time we have the ban on gas heating coming in. As of 2025 there will be a ban on gas or oil in new build housing. In 2035 it will be forbidden to install a replacement oil or gas boiler. Gas heats about 80% of homes at the moment, so this will be a very big deal. Some local governments are moving faster. Oxford is intent on tackling the global climate crisis by requiring all new builds to be net zero from 2025, and is trying to make the whole city net zero by 2040 – ten years ahead of the rest of the UK.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-67444842
Oxford City Council plans to hit net zero by 2040 and said this ban would tackle the “existential threat of climate change”.
Britain will hit the wall from a mixture of the things Francis suggests. It will be a combination of failure of wind and solar to supply reliable power, escalating prices before anyone will bid at the auctions, inability of the workforce to install all the required heat pumps, lack of local grid capacity to homes to power the heat pumps and recharge the EVs even were the heat pumps installed. Lack of public charging points for EVs, which is not simply a matter of installing them, its turning out to be impossible to get enough power to them, again because of the local grid limitations. And finally buyer resistance to EVs. So far we’ve had second cars and fleet purchases (heavily driven by tax incentives).
In the end you cannot double or triple demand while at the same time destroying reliable supply by trying to move to wind and solar.
The situation is going to get critical a year or 18 months from now when Labour get in. They are so far committed to a more aggressive schedule than the above for EVs, having said they will restore the target of 100% in 2030. They have also taken a very aggressive stance on oil and gas drilling, and have talked about getting electricity generation to net zero by 2030. Which is plainly impossible.
When will the crunch come from all this? Its likely to happen somewhat in the next couple of years, and the first sign is likely to come on EVs. Look here:
https://www.zap-map.com/ev-stats/ev-market
You can see that there is no precipitous rise in EV percentage registrations. They may just about make the 22% in 2024, but they are very unlikely to make the 28% in 2025. The more publicity there is about their drawbacks the greater consumer resistance. The first sticking point is going to be a fall in total new car sales as the quotas bite.
The second indicator is going to be the next offshore wind auction. This is going to either have to be more than double the prices of the last failed one, or again there will be no bids. The price required is going to be so high that even a Labour government is going to have to take a deep breath.
The real crunch however should come towards the end of the next government. We should assume that it will succeed in closing down ICE sales, will put into place sufficient incentives and disincentives to make people install heat pumps, and will pay enough to get more offshore wind installed. This should, if this pessimistic account is correct, lead to an increase in demand and thus to large scale and frequent blackouts in three or four years from now. And in addition, homes with heat pumps and EV chargers will be hooked up to smart meters, and these will be used to just turn off both for peak demand periods in the winter.
This all is going to spark an electoral revolt on the scale of the Dutch one, but the difference will be that the UK does not have proportional representation, so when the country turns on a dime, as it probably will in this scenario, there can be a wipeout. Think the rise of UKIP and Leave, but in spades. Labour will probably find a U-turn on energy and climate impossible. The Conservatives, under increasing threat from Reform may be able to. But if they don’t they will end up, as the Marxists say, along with Labour in the dustbin of history.
Also, a Grand Solar Minimum is just getting started which should drop temperatures.
Probably not during a strong El Niño
My official prediction…
Those percentages will be mirrored by the percentage drop in all car sales per year
Invest in Mechanics
Don’t forget that most EVs sales in the UK have been driven by the fleet market and that is getting more and more saturated. It is clear that individual purchase of EVs has slowed considerably and that trend will continue as people know when they are being sold a lie.
As far as heat pumps are concerned the current plan is for 600,000 a year to be installed from 2028. The industry themselves have regularly told the government this is not credible, not least because it would require training more people than the industry currently employs every single year. Governments and political parties live in ‘ivory towers’ divorced from reality.
Any day now…after repeating the same talking-points for decades it must be happening one day, right?
https://www.naturalgasworld.com/giant-batteries-drain-economics-of-gas-fuelled-plants-108459
If you are right we will shortly see the first national battery installation. That is, a battery installation with enough capacity to cover several days of almost no wind. To be specific, in the UK this would have to cover a full January or February 24 hour day of average demand of 35-40GW (peak at about 45GW+)and there will have to be enough wind capacity to recharge in short order when the wind picks up again.
There will have also to be enough capacity to cover a January or February calm lasting a full week, when 28GW of faceplate supplies on average about 10% of that, 2-3GW.
And to have enough spare capacity that it can manage through even a couple of month long relatively low wind period. As specified by the recent Royal Society report. There really are wind droughts if you look back over a thirty year period. Net Zero means you have to supply them. There is a reason the Royal Society dismissed batteries and turned to the desperate remedy of 900 caverns to be filled with hydrogen.
They had evidently watched Monty Python as teenagers…
When someone installs such a system and makes it work without using gas generation then wind will become at least plausible as a route to Net Zero.
At the moment you are seeing tiny battery installations, more usable to smooth out very short term fluctuations. No-one has done or even planned a national installation of the kind that is needed for Net Zero. And the Royal Society has essentially found that using batteries for it is impossible.
At some point in the near future, a lot of metals need to magically appear.
Burning hydrogen releases water vapor which is a stronger greenhouse gas than CO2.
Fossil fuel combustion releases water vapor to the atmosphere.
Assuming an average molar ratio of H2O to CO2 emission of 1.5, and current anthropogenic carbon emission rates of 9.5 Pg C/y, global combustion vapor emissions total about 21 Pg/y, or 21 billion metric ton.
There will be more rain, etc
Say, UK average demand is 40,000 MW on a January day, and during that entire day the average solar and wind output is 2,000 MW
Production fed to grid for that day is 24 x 38,000 = 912,000 MWh
The required battery capacity will be (38,000 MW) /(912,000 MWh/0.5)
There are some design factors we will ignore for simplicity
The 0.5 is due to Tesla recommending not charging over 80% and not discharging to less than 20%
That means the maximum delivered electricity is 0.6 of capacity.
I am assuming only 0.5 is actually available, if we are lucky.
There is a round-trip 20% loss from HV grid, step-down transformer, power electronics, into battery, out of battery, power electronics, step-up transformer, HV grid
That means you have to feed about 20% more into the battery than is delivered, to recharge the battery
Capital cost = 912000/0.5 x 1000 kWh/MWh x $575/delivered kWh as AC, 2023 pricing = $1048.8 billion
Double the amount, if the wind/solar lull lasts two days.
There better be enough wind and solar to recharge the batteries to at least 0.5 or better, to anticipate the next lull, plus to serve normal battery services
See
BATTERY SYSTEM CAPITAL COSTS, OPERATING COSTS, ENERGY LOSSES, AND AGING
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/battery-system-capital-costs-losses-and-aging
I did not mention, at some future date, wind and solar installed capacity is assumed high enough to provide average daily demand each day of the year.
But, if a wind/solar lull occurs, batteries are needed to make up the wind/solar shortfall
Even if batteries were $100/delivered kWh, the repeating multi-$billion cost would bankrupt the UK
Remember, these batteries last only about 15 years, and they age during that time, which increases friction losses and delivered electricity as AC
Myusername,
a larger the battery capacity requires a greater charging capacity to charge them.
Additionally there are two types of gas genertaion, closed and open cycle. The former is the backbone of our U.K. grid and to replace that with batteries would need at least double battery capacity of the gas generators.
CCGT do more than just feed the grid with some power, they balance the grid supply and demand, this is a continual second by second operation.
Where is the power going to come from to keep one battery fully charged when the other is discharging and then recharge the depleted first battery? It’s pie in the sky.
The second category of open cycle run very rarely and for short periods to meet expected shortage of grid generating capacity (Peak loppers when I was an apprentice so many years ago) which batteries can do but there is always the caveat that there is excess generation to recharge them.
To me it is purely an economic decison not an engineering one, the gas operator quoted sees his revenue declining with gas due to government poloicy so instead builds a battery plant to cash in on the frequency support market rather than covering intermittency and who can blame him? It does the grid little favour but if the government don’t care why should anyone else?
Wow, you still haven’t figured out that batteries don’t actually produce electricity, have you !
20% loss from HV grid, step-down transformer, power electronics, into battery, out of battery, power electronics, step-up transformer, HV grid
When are they going to roll out magic carpets?
Looking at the web site, I’m not so sure I would trust their analysis. But I’m skeptical of new information sources.
In September 2023 the UK’s Royal Society published two reports on Large Scale Electricity Storage. One was a ‘policy briefing’, the other the longer main report itself.
The following quotes are from the policy briefing
A study modelling solar and wind generation using 37 years of weather data
“found variations in wind supply on a multi decadal timescale, as well as sporadic periods of days and weeks of very low generation potential. For this reason some tens of TWhs of very long duration storage will be needed. For comparison the TWhs needed are 1000 times more than is currently provided by pumped storage, and far more than could be provided cost effectively by batteries”
“Conventional batteries are not expected to provide large-scale storage, although they are likely to play a role in stabilising the grid”
If you want to read the much longer main report it can bee found at
https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/low-carbon-energy-programme/large-scale-electricity-storage/
“The best thing to end the wind/solar craziness will be to have one or two jurisdictions fail spectacularly as a lesson to everyone else. I wouldn’t have wanted my own New York to volunteer for that role, but that may be what’s happening.”
I hope it happens here in WK. The arrogance of the green feminocracy that rules the state deserves to fail spectacularly.
It seems a terrible thing to wish for, but I hope that things come to a crunch this winter and there are blackouts across Europe.
This should finally show people that the net zero madness is not going to work and give us a chance to change course before it is too late.
A Grand Solar Minimum has just started.
The countries outside of the tropics may need all the heat they can get.
We may need all the greenhouses we can build as well.
Told you so. Embarrassing that reason and logic could not have prevailed where rational thinking clearly would have suggested this was indeed a fools errand. Reading about this renewal energy rubbish becomes increasingly intolerable every day as I realize I am the one paying for this nonsense. The waste and the lunacy is quite stunning and absolutely astonishing!
The MSM and the UN have the biggest voices on the planet.
…and lots of people trust both of them.
I agree with the general premise, but the examples are flat out wrong.
Milei is a Judas Goat – this is clear from his administration literally being a redux of Macri’s. Kind of like Biden’s administration being literally a rehash of Obama/HRC apparatchiks.
As for Wilders – he’s the real deal but I would bet money that the other Dutch parties will Rube Goldberg some form of coalition to ensure Wilders doesn’t get into power. If the Spanish are willing to literally pardon Catalan terrorists/insurrectionists (by Spain’s own description) to keep the Right and Far Right parties out of power there, why would anything think anything less will happen in the Netherlands this time?
why would anything think anything less will happen in the Netherlands this time?
Because the Dutch are a different kind of people. When they make up their collective minds about something, get out of the way.
Trying to explain that its not what it seems to a someone not from Europe, I told him about the 80 years war of independence. It started with the execution of Hoorn and Egmont by the Spanish in 1568, in Brussels. By 1648 the Spanish were broke, exhausted and defeated on the battlefields and peace negotiations were underway. The Dutch were agreeable, but on condition the peace treaty would be signed in the same place, on the same date, and at the same time of the day when Hoorn and Egmont had been executed 80 years earlier.
In 1588, Spain lost the Armada, and did not have access to enough 100-y oak trees to build big battle ships to rival the Dutch and UK.
As a result, Spain became a land power that was deprived of what it needed to win by Dutch/UK navies, plus those navies stopped Spanish treasure ships, unloaded them to ensure Spain paid back debts
Spain, impotent and impoverished, lost the 80-y war and the Habsburg and French Empires became more prominent
Oak trees? Spanish ships were highly regarded as prizes by the Royal Navy right into the early 19th century because, due to the Spanish territories, many of them were built from South American hardwoods which were more durable and tougher than oak. You might also want to check your facts regarding the Spanish ships, especially the big 1st raters like the Nuestra Senora de la Santisima Trinidad.
Other than the facts, which you got wrong, it was an interesting post.
The PJM interconnection recently issued a warning that all this green energy and the closure of a 1280 MW plant outside Baltimore will result in grid instability and unreliability. When one looks at their daily grid information–load and sources of generation–it is easy to see that coal, gas and nuclear keep the lights on. Losing that reliability could sink the entire grid, and probably about 1/4 of the US, including Washington, DC. That would be a wakeup call. Let’s just hope it doesn’t happen in the dead of winter.
Let’s just hope it
doesn’thappens in the dead of winter.There, fixed it.
The masses appeared to have accepted as valid the unfounded theory that:
In spite of that acceptance, the masses retained an instinctive residue of skepticism in that, when asked, they generally volunteered to personally invest almost nothing into that net zero endeavor. It was only through the autocratic edicts of intellectually impaired governments and unelected bureaucrats that measure were taken.
Now as the pain of believing this delusional climate religion becomes manifest and all the promised benefits remain elusive, it is inevitable that the charade will fall apart. Soon, looking behind the curtain to spot the wizard busy in his evil ways will become a more popular sport than gluing oneself to the pavement. Eventually the slow-witted media will discover a new form of journalism based on blaming others for years of wrong-headed propaganda dressed up as “news”.
Lies and mistakes can tread water for only so long before the truth floats to the surface.
We are nowhere near the era of confession. Australia is closest to the point of clear failure but they are throwing ever more money at renewables.
https://www.cfact.org/2023/11/25/australian-government-throws-giant-pile-of-money-at-renewables-so-big-the-cost-is-a-secret/
As soon as some jurisdiction–state, province or country tries to begin powering their constituents completely with wind and solar using their usual (politically] favored load factors, the system will crash with immediate outages from overload. Perhaps many of you Have done the simple arithmetic of of their load factors. I notice whenever I see some announcement of a wind/solar installation where they say that system of X megawatts will power Y number of households, the delivered power per household iusually works out to around 2500 watts or less. That’s less than 25 Amps service. Most newer homes have 100 or 200 amps. What they have done is taken a high average monthly kilowatt-hour number for a household and assumed that is the average usage in watts at a particular time. However, they neglect to consider usage is generally lots of peak demands of 8 to 10 kilowatts when all appliances and essentials like furnaces, water pumps, refrigerators, etc kick in at the same time. Then the usage drops to maybe under 2500 watts. BUT, early in the evening and mornings, every household may be peaking at the same time, blowing up that 2500 watt per household average. In my house, 5kw will run the background stuff, but when my well pump and oil furnace start, I need about 9kw minimum, depending on if the refrigerator and freezers start at the same time. These art majors don’t realize that heavily loaded electric motors can use 5X or more of their running current to start. My well pump for example, uses nearly 7500 watts to start, but runs on 1400 watts. The same art majors don’t realize that all physical systems need to be designed for max loads, not averages.
Yes, this is exactly the problem. Its why LCOE as usually calculated is a fallacy, because it treats all watts generated as equally useful, regardless of whether there is demand for it when its generated. Its why the UK is to regulate that heat pumps and car chargers must be on smart meters, so the utility company can turn them off when everyone tries to use them at once. Can’t match supply to demand by changing supply, so the only thing left is to change demand to match the wind.
I am sure it can be done, but the price is to give up having a modern industrialized society.
As far as the election result in the Netrherlands is concerned, it is quite possible that the policies associated with Net Zero played a part in the success of Geert Wilders’ party. But is is also possible that immigration played a bigger part, or at least an equal part. Just saying that Geert Wilders is anti-Net Zero so therefore his success shows a movement away from support for Net Zero is too simplistic.
there are notable developments and challenges in the progression of the Green Energy Wall. Let’s break down the key points:
It’s worth noting that the success of any large-scale environmental initiative, like the Green Energy Wall, depends on a delicate balance between public awareness, political support, and the economic viability of the proposed solutions. Overcoming challenges in cost-effectiveness is a common hurdle faced by emerging technologies, and addressing these issues is vital for the long-term sustainability and acceptance of green energy initiatives.