The cries of climate alarm get ever louder and more urgent. (E.g., New York Times, January 9, “It’s confirmed: 2023 was the planet’s warmest year on record and perhaps in the last 100,000 years. By far.”). We’re all about to boil! Something must be done!
OK, but then there is the proposed solution: Order up by government fiat that our current fully working and inexpensive energy system must be replaced with a never-demonstrated pipe dream conjured up by political science and gender studies majors who know nothing about how an energy system works. We’re far enough into this by now that some of the pieces are starting to blow up in dramatic fashion. Are we allowed to notice?
Here in New York, we got into this game mainly with two pieces of legislation, both enacted in 2018 — at the state level, the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act; and in the City, Local Law 97. With both laws the pols set the deadlines for compliance at dates seemingly far in the future, expecting that they would no longer be around to be held accountable. The first of those two laws ordered up state-wide mandates for “decarbonizing” the economy, starting with a requirement for 70% of electricity from “renewables” by 2030; and the second set limits for carbon emissions for buildings in New York City, some of which have just kicked in effective January 1, 2024. Sure enough, the Mayor at the time of enactment is gone, almost the entire City Council is gone (term limits), and the Governor at the time is also gone.
So where are we?
The Manhattan Contrarian Energy Storage Report of December 1, 2022, led off by sounding a clear alarm: getting electricity from intermittent wind and solar well past 50% of total generation would require enormous quantities of energy to be stored, with technical requirements, including duration of storage, well beyond the capability of any battery currently existing or likely to be invented any time soon. Essentially, if fossil fuels are to be eliminated, there is only one realistic possibility for meeting the storage requirements: hydrogen.
In mid-2023, the New York Independent System Operator, to its credit, recognized the problem — although it buried that recognition deep in a report when it should be shouting about the problem from the rooftops. From NYISO’s Power Trends 2023 Report, revised August 2023, page 7, starting in the middle of a paragraph and without any emphasis:
[T]o achieve the mandates of the CLCPA, new emission-free generating technologies with the necessary reliability service attributes will be needed to replace the flexible, dispatchable capabilities of fossil fuel generation and sustain production for extended periods of time. Such emission-free technologies, either individually or in aggregate, are not yet available on a commercial scale.
With hydrogen as the only possible such “emissions-free generating technology,” how much would hydrogen cost as the solution to this problem, particularly if one follows the hypothesis that it must be created without any use of fossil fuels? My Report, page 14, noted that existing commercial production of this so-called “green” hydrogen was “negligible,” leaving no good benchmark for understanding what the costs might be. As a substitute, I ran some rough numbers based on cost of wind and solar generators to make the electricity and efficiency of the electrolysis process. The result was a very rough estimate that this “green” hydrogen would cost “somewhere in the range of 5 to 10 times more” than natural gas (page 17).
Well, now some new precision has come into view. In July 2022 the UK government launched what it calls its First Hydrogen Allocation Round (HAR 1), to obtain bids and award contracts to produce this so-called “green” hydrogen using wind power. The process took a while, but here from December 14, 2023 is the announcement of the first round of contract awards. Excerpt:
Following the launch of the first hydrogen allocation round (HAR1) in July 2022, we have selected the successful projects to be offered contracts. We are pleased to announce 11 successful projects, totalling 125MW capacity. HAR1 puts the UK in a leading position internationally: this represents the largest number of commercial scale green hydrogen production projects announced at once anywhere in Europe. . . . The 11 projects have been agreed at a weighted average strike price of £241/MWh.
£241/MWh? At today’s exchange rate of 1.27 $/£, that would be $306/MWh. Prices of natural gas are generally quoted in $/MMBTU rather than per MWh, but here is EIA’s latest Electricity Monthly Update, dated December 21 and covering the month of October 2023. It gives natural gas prices in the per MWh units. The “price of natural gas at New York City” is given as $11.32/MWh. That would make the price that the UK has just agreed to pay to buy this “green” hydrogen stuff approximately 27 times what we can buy natural gas for here in New York to obtain the same energy content.
And that $306/MWh is just for the hydrogen. It includes nothing for the massive new facilities (underground salt caverns?) to store the stuff, for a new pipeline network to transport it, and for a new collection of power plants to burn it.
To be at least a little fair, natural gas prices do vary considerably by location. Even within the U.S., some prices per the EIA Report are about double the New York City price, and in Europe maybe four times the New York City price. But those prices are affected by European demand for LNG from the U.S., due to their own stupid decision to ban fracking for natural gas combined with the unpleasantness in Russia.
And even if you figure that green hydrogen can be produced for “only” 7 – 10 times what it costs to buy natural gas, rather than 25 – 30 times, is anybody really going to go forward with such a project to replace all natural gas in an entire modern economy? It would be completely nuts.
Finally, let’s take a look at how New York is progressing toward that 2030 mandated goal of 70% of electricity from renewables. Data on electricity production for New York State for 2023 are just out from the NYISO. The good people from Nuclear New York (advocates for more nuclear power plants) have compiled the ISO data into a helpful aggregate chart covering the years 2019 (immediately after enactment of the Climate Change Act) to 2023. Here is the chart:
Out of 152.3 TWh of electricity produced or imported in 2023, fossil fuels continued to provide 63.3 TWh (41.5%). Most of the imports (14.5%) are undoubtedly from fossil fuels as well. Wind/solar/other provided just 12.1 TWh, or 7.9% of the total, barely up from about 6% in 2019. And that’s now suddenly going to go to 70% by 2030? Ridiculous. Meanwhile, the big story leaps off the page, as the Nuclear New York guys emphasize in the headline. The State forced the premature closure of two nuclear plants in 2020 and 2021, which caused the (carbon free) nuclear share of the total to drop from about 29% to only 18%; and almost all of that was taken up by two new natural gas plants, causing the fossil fuel share of the total to soar from only 34% to 41.5%. No person looking at this chart would ever conclude that New York has spent the past five years embarked on a crash program to replace fossil fuels with wind and solar. That process is going absolutely nowhere.
The truth is that the march to the Great Green Energy Future is over, but no one is yet willing to admit that.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
The truth is that the march to the Great Green Energy Future is over, but no one is yet willing to admit that.
Well some are beginning to look seriously into the overarching cause of the problem-
We’ve hit peak science, and that’s not good (msn.com)
We’ve hit peak science, and that’s not good (msn.com)
I’ll fix that article title
We’ve hit peak stupidity, and that’s to be expected (msn.com)
There, much better
Can’t belive by experience that we hit peak stupidity. There will come more.
Yes, if the morons being elected are any indication, peak stupidity has merely begun…
We’re approaching the foothills of Peak Stupidity. We’ll know we’ve reached the summit when people are dying like flies.
“that we hit peak stupidity”
NEVER give the leftist a challenge like that.
There has been no shift in the bell curve regarding IQ…….. There is a concern that a shift downward is coming due to a reduction in working memory for those who spend 5-9 hours on devices a day. So going cold turkey on your devices two weeks prior to taking SAT or IQ testing is a good idea.
The other factor is IQ is nothing without desire. High IQ is only the measure of potential. It takes desire to do the hard work of integrative thinking and creating epoch defining new paradigms whether conceptual or tech innovation. I agree we are in a tech/sciences quagmire holding us in the same information tech/population control paradigm. AI is of the same old paradigm that has been with us since the early days of Apple. 50 years of the same paradigm is peak stupidity.
1970 where a time of very creative high level thinking about the decentralization of energy production and good and services productive and distribution. The Apple boys pretty much erased all that great creative thought and empowered even further centralization (information and markets), which by definition is population control.
Our brightest are not now smart enough to give us a top drawer electrical generation, storage and distribution system. I might be wrong…. maybe is just a lack of desire and no funding….and this would be a key example of stupidity. Science peaking itself due to the political and power agenda’s of the megalomaniacal few.
As the saying goes, every time you make something idiot-proof along comes a new class of idiot.
You can make it foolproof, but not damn fool proof.
I’m afraid peak stupidity is an illusion. As Einstein said: The difference between intelligence and stupidity is that intelligence has its limits
Peak science is a lie so that we (the problem) should not expect any new innovation that would empower us to have cheap energy or solve any of our real problems or mean any of our real needs. We have been abandoned to stupidity.
If we have reached peaked stupidity, which I agree we have, then no one will make any real demands of science to solve real problems like “cheap energy” for us. Only to further captivate us so that we become and remain even happier creatures who no longer care because we have become so stupid. Happy, stupid even while the demand for psychotherapy by our young people goes into orbit around Neptune.
To quote Otter from “Animal House”: “I think that this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture.”
Please watch this most recent interview with Dr. Mariana Alves-Pereira:
https://www.windconcerns.com/conspiracy-theory-or-health-disaster/
The interview with Dr. Mariana Alves-Peirera is missing a major element and is quite disappointing because of that lack. In earlier lectures on the topic she went into detail about the progress of research that found major medical problems created with infrasound. It started with observed symptoms of people working around infrasound producing jet engines to finding major infrasound related problems in various other industries, to finding ways to diagnose effects in the body, starting initially with autopsies, then with biopsies, eventually with non-invasive instrumental diagnoses (e.g. specialized imaging).
Videos were, hopefully still are, available on-line. Supposedly these changes are not detected in most cases because they are not readily observable at the macro level; one has to know what to look for and how to detect them. Bringing this aspect into an interview would not require explanation of the background, only a statement that tissue changes occur and that those changes can be observed through medical diagnosis.
What she claimed in that two types of connective tissue, both found extensively in the human and other animal bodies, are modified by exposure to infrasound. She further said that the research by her institution was able to consistently duplicate their findings with lab animals. If I understood correctly, limited exposure produces changes that the body can repair if the cause is removed. Longer term exposure produces permanent changes.
Many questions were unanswered. A few among many are: Why are some people effected more than others? Why are tissues in various areas of the body effected differently and differentially from individual to individual? How do the tissue changes produce the medical symptoms (some particular symptoms seemed to be explained in her lectures, other not)? Why are the damages different from person to person (a wide range of symptoms occur from seemingly the same exposure) ?
Regardless, if that research was valid, and I have seen nothing even acknowledging it by critics let alone refuting it, the tools exist to bypass the tallying of reported symptoms. Symptoms can only circumstantially be related to causes. Direct medical investigation of the bodies, human and otherwise, showing that tissues are being abnormally modified, would produce much more positive evidence of the problem and critics would have the responsibility of showing through experimentation that those tissue changes do not result in any harms.
The real problem here is the lack of any interest in researching something which no one else has recognized as being a pressing issue. Over the years there have been many “fringe” studies which which claim some astounding biological effects but have never been duplicated. Probably because no one wants to risk their funding or career on some unproven theory. Yet savvy entrepreneurs are always eager to develop products to sell to a gullible public for problems which don’t seem to exist. Devices to “fix” dirty electricity as well as human caused climate change come to mind…
As far as CAGW goes, the 1979 JASON group report on atmospheric CO2 was peak ‘science’ – they’ve been treading water ever since then.
MSNBC justified not covering Trump’s victory speech by declaring that they don’t publish lies.
MSNBC is in competition with CNN to have themselves declared the publication arm of the DNC.
MSNBC and CNN are propaganda arms of the Democrat Party.
MSNBC’s Rachael Madow didn’t look very happy about Trump winning in Iowa. Rachael is going to be even more unhappy in the future, and Jake Tapper of CNN claimed Trump was giving an “anti-immigrant speech and cut away from the speech. Trump isn’t anti-immigrant, Trump is anti-illegal immigrant. There’s a difference, Jake. But I don’t expect you will explain the difference to your dwindling audience. That’s why your audience is dwindling: You don’t tell them the truth.
Trump will win New Hampshire and South Carolina in a few more weeks and then the presidential nomination race will be over and Trump will be the nominee.
Amen
From the link:
Ask Peter Ridd how that went?
Universities depend on government for funding. They support political agendas.
How many research papers do you see on review of “renewable” energy projects – forecast versus outcome. Failures get buried and no one wants to talk about them. This shuts down the learning process.
Look, chaps, the hydrogen cannot be green if it’s using windmills which otherwise will be feeding the grid. Tell me when we have the total electricity demand met by windmills. With a lot over for hydrogen production. Why haven’t they spotted this point? Perhaps there’ll be a little private wind farm charging hydrogen while NY citizens freeze? Barmy as usual; no, MORE barmy than usual.
It can’t be “green” anyway, since windmills and solar panels have all of THEIR energy inputs coming from COAL, OIL AND GAS!
NOTHING BUT A TAIL-CHADING EXERCISE!
CHASING
Dunno about the correction:
Sounds like Greens all over to me.
That is not true. Seeing loud proclamations, from either viewpoint, without solid evidence gets to be rather tiring. Energy inputs for wind and solar are the wind and the sun, not fossil fuels. Production of the facilities requires fossil fuels, exactly as does building and fueling thermal facilities.
Production of electricity and fuel for most uses requires the use of some energy. It seems well established that electrical production from coal, gas, nuclear, and under favorable conditions hydro, have large positive net energy output That is, they produce much more energy over their lifetimes than the energy required to build the system and keep it fueled. Apparently the same is true for liquid fuels from petroleum and coal.
Can wind and solar do the same? Even if the ration of net output over total input is lower than from coal, etc., it could be high enough to justify their use. Claims abound from both sides but verifiable data seems rather thin. It is true that there are other serious deficiencies of wind and solar production but not true that they cannot produce energy without fossil fuels. Also true is that it would be long term highly beneficial to stop burning fossil fuels because they are feedstock for so much of modern life and there is no evidence that the supply is limitless.
I know of no isolated, stand-alone system that does run, or seemingly, can run on wind and solar alone. Near to us is King Island, Tasmania, which is a test bed for W&S. Support comes from diesel like we previously used for a now-finished tungsten mine that my employer company used to operate. There is a similar test bed at Canary Islands.
The reality is that a backup is needed for when sun does not shine and wind does not blow. If that backup is hydro, you can label that as renewable and claim better success. If the backup is nuclear, people class it as renewable or not, to prove a point that they want to make. If batteries are backup, they should not be included because they do not generate electricity, they merely store it with losses. It all boils down to endless word salads promoting assorted beliefs while the engineering reality is that W&S are inferior to hydrocarbons, nuclear and hydro in terms of being able to run a cheap, reliable national scale electricity supply alone.
Geoff S
The idea is to use surplus wind power, such as at night when demand is low. Of course that would never produce enough hydrogen so you would have to build many more windmills to make the hydrogen to cover when the wind doesn’t blow. It’s madness.
Can anyone explain how H2 can be economically produced at scale using and energy source that comes and goes erratically? Imagine trying to operate an oil refinery solely on intermittent wind/solar power. Green hydrogen is a fantasy pushed by incompetent idiots.
The problem is that you start getting wind surpluses only very intermittently – and they are small and variable. The result is that you will struggle to make any kind of economic sense of using them to make hydrogen. As you invest more – hint: COST, not free – the surpluses becomes larger and a bit more frequent. But still the surpluses are variable in size, and highly intermittent. It will remain cheaper to discard most of the surpluses than to build transmission and pipeline capacity and electrolysis plants and salt caverns to try to use them. Yet the surpluses continue to grow, and the revenue earning hours of wind farms to fall. That pushes up the prices they need to charge to cover their costs, since more and more of their output has zero value (but it COST to make available).
This mouseover chart illustrates the problem, showing wind surplus duration curves at various levels of wind capacity.
https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/nZM72/1/
Some years ago, during a discussion with an advocate of wind turbines in Iowa, I looked at the official utility data. At that time electrical production from wind in Iowa was under 10%, while the great majority was from coal plants, so disruption of the grid by wind was minimal. The advocate’s position is that Iowa is so windy that wind can certainly provide for all its needs.
The most interesting official statistic was provided only in gross terms, the 6 warmest vs the 6 coldest months of the year. The capacity factor for the 6 warmest months was 16%. I can think of no reason that would have changed significantly since then.
This means that an overbuild of more than 6X would be necessary in order to rely on wind for that half of the year. Of course we know that even that many turbines would not always produce what is needed. However, if so many were installed, there would probably be many times, even in the summer, when excess electricity would be produced. That doesn’t make it other than a psychotic dream, and extremely expensive, but having excess electricity for hydrogen making is theoretically possible.
Andy,
No, your logic is wrong in both theory and practice.
An area like Iowa does have times of low wind that lead to (near enough) zero output from windmills. Even if you built 20 times the number of windmills, they would still produce close enough to zero electricity in that lull. Even if the lull in wind hit all these 20x windmills for half an hour, no present system like batteries could cope. Some places would be in trouble without backup generation, from a 5 minute lull.
These systems are horribly fragile, especially compared with a nuclear plant which often will run for years with 95% or better production between planned maintenance stops (on a footprint of 1-5% of the land area of a wind farm of similar output.
Geoff S
So, they take Water (H2O) and strip the H (H2?) leaving behind the O. What do they do with the O? Vent it to atmosphere?
Store it as well on site for recombination with the H during Hydrogen burning?
The problem with separating the H2 and O is that, for as long as the H is stored, the O is resident in atmosphere increasing atmospheric levels.
According to an article in earth magazine…
Increasing the O2 levels in atmosphere by just 2.1% will lead to more fires, faster burning fires and faster spreading more destructive fires.
EARTH Magazine suspended publication in April 2019.
On the other hand, O2 at 20.9 % of the atmosphere, has been falling.
It was .06165% higher in 1989 than it is today.
So 20.96% instead of 20.9% must be that slight increase on CO2 temporarily removing some from circulation
I strongly suspect that excess O2 production by anything humans could do would be comparable to “global” heating from human energy use. That later ratio is human energy use over one year approaches solar energy input over two hours. In other words, the “excess” would never make a measurable difference.
A study published some years ago calculated the atmospheric O2 decrease would be a not particularly large part of 1% from burning every gram of the estimated organic matter on and within the earth
That quote from the UK:
That sound you hear is the sound of the UK political establishment going totally insane.
Another confirmation that wind and solar are free .. :-}
Well, just paid for in subsidies added to consumer bills…
not true. Huge subsidies from “tax monies” (actually debt increases) are what really power solar and wind production.
I don’t think you are familiar with the UK system which is rather different from the US, where tax credits are the main subsidy route. In the UK, there are two main forms of subsidy.
Renewables Obligations still account for most of the subsidy. Energy retailers are required to buy them off renewables generators, who get accredited balances based on their metered generation and the number of ROCs/MWh they are entitled to based on their technology and timing of investment. In order to ensure the price is well bid the Obligation is set to create an artificial shortage that has to be made good through cashout purchases: the cashout fund is then redistributed as a credit to ROCs actually purchased, which means that the price at which they sell is a premium to the cashout price. Government is not involved in these transactions, save that OFGEM collects the cashout monies and redistributes them.
The other form of subsidy is via CFDs. Here, the difference between the CFD strike price and the market price is paid to the generator on the volume gnerated, accounted for with hourly metering and pricing. The monies for payment are collected daily from energy retailers via the Interim Levy Rate which is set high enough to ensure that there is a surplus fund to pay generators. The intermediary is the Low Carbon Contracts Company which handles all the accounting.
In neither case is government tax money involved. The charges flow directly from generators to retailers and thence to customers, keeping it all “off balance sheet” so far a\s government is concerned.
Another hidden form of subsidy is the imposition of additional taxes on the competition – UKA carbon taxes, and climate levies. This raises market prices for at least the benefit of generators on ROCs. There is no benefit to those on CFDs, because a higher market price results in a lower subsidy payment to them (or even briefly during the crisis they had to pay back to consumers).
For grid scale applications if the batteries were free battery storage for more than 4 hours would still be too expensive. The site prep, enclosures, over current protection, interconnecting switch gear, fire suppression and more costs $200/kwh, $200,000/MWH.
A typical conventional power plant is rated at 1,000 MW, $200.000,000/MWH. $200 million x 100 hours of storage for a few days of cloudy and calm costs $20,000,000,000= $20 billion, batteries not included.
You’re thinking, no, that’s impossible, nobody would ever spend that much, that must be a lie. Nope, the big lie is battery storage will be affordable, a breakthrough will come along, and everything will be fine. Bull Feathers, it’s a total fraud, don’t doubt it. 2024 grid scale packet price is $550/kwh.
Trust gang green to want to make a colossally expensive, technically problematic and dangerous substitute gas for abundant natural gas rather than admit that renewables only worked courtesy of fossil fuel backup.
And fossil fuels to produce, whether directly or indirectly, the substitutes.
Ring me back when windmills and solar panels are sourced 100% from energy produced by windmills and solar panels.
It’s nothing but a tail-chasing exercise!
You are correct, DGS. The people who yammer on and on about how battery costs will decline have never done any cost estimation. Even if battery prices decline, construction and facilities costs are what they are. DOE lately said they are hoping costs of delivering stored energy decline by 90% (yes 90%) to $0.05 per kWhr. That is a long, long way to go.
And the Search for the Magic Battery continues…
It’s been going on for at least a century and a half.
Battery costs can’t decline, the construction materials are scarce and getting more so – the price will only ever go up. The fallacious idea that costs would decrease was based on a wrong assumption that the materials were very common and available to use.
There’s another fallacious idea, that being that the manufacture of batteries is a present little more than a cottage industry, and that once it gets fully industrialized, construction costs are going to plummet. (The same thinking applies to electric cars as well.)
The truth is that both products are already being mass produced and have been for years.
The real problem for batteries is that revenue prospects are in decline. There is only so much grid support that they can usefully provide. Once capacity exceeds that, competition will erode the income, and in the UK that has already happened: frequency support that earned £17/MW/h now auctions for £1-2/MW/h – 90% of the income is gone. Trying to make money from charging cheap and discharging expensively enough to pay for round trip losses and generate a margin gets more and more difficult the longer the battery duration. That’s why there is very little talk of batteries beyond 4 hour duration, and even they struggle to justify themselves.
I ran a calculation on the return on pumped storage in the UK, assuming that they paid/received day ahead market prices. Over the course of last year the various sites (dominated by Dinorwig, but including Cruachan, etc.) made a gross margin of £54m on redelivery of 175GWh on that basis at 76.3% round trip efficiency. Of course in practice they will have had additional income from ancillary services, and they likely will have benefited from better prices on a portion of their volume sold (or bought) in the Balancing Mechanism to help out the Grid. It’s not a huge return on assets that would cost ~£3-4bn today, and the average utilisation is quite low. Moreover, the market was still very volatile in the first half of the year, which gives bigger margins.
BATTERY SYSTEM CAPITAL COSTS, OPERATING COSTS, ENERGY LOSSES, AND AGING
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/battery-system-capital-costs-losses-and-aging
.
EXCERPT:
.
Batteries Far from an Economic Alternative to Power Plant Fleets
.
Annual Cost of Megapack Battery Systems; 2023 pricing
.
Assume a system rated 45.3 MW/181.9 MWh, and an all-in turnkey cost of $104.5 million, per Example 2
Amortize bank loan for 50% of $104.5 million at 6.5%/y for 15 years, $5.484 million/y
Pay Owner return of 50% of $104.5 million at 10%/y for 15 years, $6.765 million/y (10% due to high inflation)
Lifetime (Bank + Owner) payments 15 x (5.484 + 6.765) = $183.7 million
.
Assume battery daily usage for 15 years at 10%, and loss factor = 1/(0.9 *0.9)
Battery lifetime output = 15 y x 365 d/y x 181.9 MWh x 0.1, usage x 1000 kWh/MWh = 99,590,250 kWh to HV grid; 122,950,926 kWh from HV grid; 233,606,676 kWh loss
.
(Bank + Owner) payments, $183.7 million / 99,590,250 kWh = 184.5 c/kWh
Less 50% subsidies (ITC, depreciation in 5 years, deduction of interest on borrowed funds) is 92.3c/kWh
At 10% usage, (Bank + Owner) cost, 92.3 c/kWh
At 40% usage, (Bank + Owner) cost, 23.1 c/kWh
.
Excluded costs/kWh: 1) O&M; 2) system aging, 1.5%/y, 3) HV grid to HV grid loss, 3) grid extension/reinforcement to connect battery systems, 5) downtime of parts of the system, 6) decommissioning in year 15, i.e., disassembly, reprocessing and storing at hazardous waste sites.
.
NOTE: The 40% throughput is close to Tesla’s recommendation of 60% maximum throughput, i.e., not charging above 80% full and not discharging below 20% full, to achieve a 15-y life, with normal aging
.
NOTE: Tesla’s recommendation was not heeded by the owners of the Hornsdale Power Reserve in Australia. They added Megapacks to offset rapid aging of the original system, and added more Megapacks to increase the rating of the expanded system.
http://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/the-hornsdale-power-reserve-largest-battery-system-in-australia
The battery tech just isn’t good enough. It failed due to the motivation to solve a non-problem and in the end the solution became the most immediate problem very quickly.
It would be awesome if the tech did exist but it doesn’t and the big question …why not?
I would use it to generate store and distribute electricity at home burning oil to heat my house to run the generator. The Tesla batteries make the entire proposition why too expensive …bad tech.
The turnkey capital cost was obtained from an actual project, based on 2023 Megapack pricing.
Regarding any project, the bank and the owner have to be paid, no matter what.
Therefore, I amortized the bank loan and the owner’s investment
If you divide the total of the payments over 15 years by the throughput during 15 years, you get the cost per kWh, as shown.
According to the EIA annual reports, almost all battery systems have throughputs less than 10%. .I chose 10% as the base case.
A few battery systems have higher throughputs, if they are used to absorb midday solar and discharge it during peak hour periods in late-afternoon/early-evening.
They may reach up to 40% throughput. I chose 40% for another set of calculations
Remember, you have to draw about 50 units from the HV grid to deliver about 40 units to the HV grid, because of a-to-z losses. That gets worse with aging.
A lot of people do not like these c/kWh numbers, because they have been repeatedly told by self-serving folks, battery Nirvana is just around the corner, which is a load of crap.
The other big battery lie is that they will get revenues to cover their costs. I’ve been looking at the Australian batteries – in particular the original South Australian one the Hornsdale Power Reserve, and the Victorian Big Battery. The charts shows their cumulative net income since start up, divided between energy arbitrage (charging cheap and discharging at peak prices) and FCAS, which is Australian for frequency support ancillary services – i.e. helping to handle grid frequency variations because of short term renewables intermittency due to gustiness and clouds for the most part.
It’s very obvious that the HPR has made most of its money from FCAS, with particular periods of gouging accounting for much of it. It has had little competition since much of the inertia providing plant in South Australia has been closed or shut out by excess rooftop solar in particular, but also excess wind. Even now there are only a couple of small batteries in competition. However, FCAS revenue is likely to be eroded by competition. In the UK where battery capacity now exceeds the ancillary services demand for it I’ve even seen the daily Dynamic Containment auction clear at negative prices because batteries can use it to charge up, and bid for the right to do so, eroding margins on the other leg: energy arbitrage. These days HPR is notionally 150MW/194MWh, though how much of the 194MWh is really operational is perhaps a slightly open question: its round trip efficiency has been on the decline again, and throughputs have fallen, as has income as opportunities appear to have dried up.
VBB is supposedly 300MW/450MWh, so slightly longer duration, but it plainly has been struggling to find profitable trading opportunities. Of course, it faces direct competition in the FCAS market from the remaining coal plant in Victoria, and there is not the same renewables surplus as in South Australia. However, if it struggles at 90 minute duration it is very hard to see how adding storage capacity is going to provide adequate profit opportunities. It will depend on the creation of volatile markets with alarming swings between massive renewables surpluses and real shortages driving prices upwards.
Great info
I have added it to my article
http://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/the-hornsdale-power-reserve-largest-battery-system-in-australia
Brilliant piece by Francis. Another one. Really gets to the heart of the matter, terse and to the point but all you need to know. And the example of the UK is spot-on, the UK is the classic canary.
Squawk!
Cheep! The only time a canary squawks is just before a well-fed cat wanders off with a smile on its face.
Sitting in the UK, looking at the fat cats…. And your point was, Richard?
The real canary was South Australia, when the entire state went dark in 2016.
Europe has been showing the way. Windmills and solar in the EU peaked in 2017! By 2019, some 47GW of of it had aged to decommissioning status. Then Covid, then a wave of renewables companies went into bankruptcy, then Green Policy assault on fossil fuels through defunding, regulations, removal of access to resources… bore fruit pushing up natural gas and coal prices sky high, when it suddenly became apparent to Gang Green that renewables don’t work without fossil fuel backup!
This created panic buying of natural gas at spot prices 10x what they could have got it for on longterm contracts 2years before. The high prices for fossil fuels then created Green Policy-Caused rampant global inflating for everything including raw materials for making renewables units, including… wait for it …the fossil fuels absolutely essential for manufacturing, shipping and installation of them. Meanwhile, more decommissioning piling up unreported. It is my contention that 2017 remains the year of peak renewables in Europe.
What is your definition of peak?
Is the second part some creative writing to explain the rise of gas prices due to ukraine war?
But nice to see you back with this again 🙂
Well… that was a truly mindless comment.. Well done !
Comment:
“Much” of the 3,800 – 4,000 MW German wind turbine capacity requiring decommissioning in 2021 “will be decommissioned and recycled.”
“In 2021…decommissioning of 230 wind turbine with a capacity of 233 MW.
233/3900 = 6% of German wind turbine capacity requiring decommissioning actually conducted.
Rest assured the percentage in 2024 is much worse and will continue to worsen for decades.
quotes
While wind energy is increasing its share in Europe’s electricity mix, more and more first-generation wind turbines are coming close to their operational end-of-life. In Germany, for example, all turbines installed up to and including the year 2000 will reach the end of their 20-year EEG feed-in tariffs in 2021. Much of the 3.800-4.000 MW capacity affected in 2021 will be decommissioned and recycled.
.https://www.windguard.com/year-2021.
In 2021, 484 new onshore wind turbines (WTG) were installed in Germany. Together, the new installations have a capacity of 1,925 MW. This is offset by the decommissioning of 230 wind turbines with a capacity of 233 MW. Thus, a net installation of 1,692 MW could be achieved in 2021.
more imaginary tech that does not exist
According to a recent Wind Europe ‘optimistic’ press release 13GW of wind in Europe will be decommissioned by 2030.
‘Repowering wind farms: a major opportunity for Europe’ Press Release 23rd Nov 2023
https://windeurope.org/newsroom/
It should read; “…the DEATH march to the Great Green Energy Future is over, but no one is willing to admit that.”
Like all great cultural fads and zealous religious movements, the KatastrophicKlimateKult is peopled by those who are reluctant or unable to easily perceive reality. Far too often they are only too happy to take for Gospel that which their leaders and fellow travelers tell them! Look at how our alarmist commenters here at WUWT cling to their beliefs despite hundreds of well-reasoned arguments against them!
There must be a strong tendency throughout Mankind to take fierce pleasure in being right; during Paleolithic times it would often be the difference between life and death! That same yearning to be correct is, presumably, the impetus behind the Enlightenment and the rise of the sciences. But it can be wholly perverted when a socio/psychopath is able to convince the naive and gullible of an alternate reality! Then you get a True Believer who sees themselves not only as a fighter for Truth, but also against Evil!
This is where we are, January 2024! We see them as dangerously deluded and frightened; they see us as evil and obstinate, standing in the path to the Great Green Energy pie in the sky!
The cries of climate alarm get ever louder and more urgent
What’s going wrong?
“”A third of UK teenagers believe climate change is “exaggerated”, a report has found
…
The report published on Tuesday shows a shift from the “old denial” – that climate change is not happening or not anthropogenic – to the “new denial”.
These new denial narratives that question the science…””
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/16/third-of-uk-teenagers-believe-climate-change-exaggerated-report-shows
Who authored the report?
“”the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) “”
Laughable stuff
You’re still allowing the delusions to invade your reasoning.
THERE IS NO “GREEN HYDROGEN.”
Conveniently forgotten in the whole discussion about producing hydrogen using windmills and solar panels is that ALL THE ENERGY INPUTS INTO THE MANUFACTURE OF WINDMILLS AND SOLAR PANELS COME FROM COAL, OIL AND GAS.
The whole “green energy” joke has become a spectacle akin to watching someone chasing, like a dog after its tail, a turd dangling from their rectum with their eager mouth, convinced by someone that it will taste like filet mignon, if only they could reach it.
If they ever managed to achieve their goal, they won’t be happy with the result.
Green Hydrogen, made from electricity produced by wind and solar systems (which themselves would have been made with only wind and solar electricity), would be at least 1.0 to $2.0 / kWh.
That would totally de-industrialize the Western world.
How in hell can people even think along these lines?
Their brain waves must be totally scrambled, because they drank the Fauci-approved mRNA Kool-Aid
Kaczynski has a great many disciples.
Here is a part of the “The Great Green Energy Future” that has turned into a major FIASCO for the entire world that has colder weather
Chicago-area Tesla charging stations lined with dead cars in freezing cold: ‘A bunch of dead robots out here’
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/chicago-area-tesla-charging-stations-lined-with-dead-cars-in-1
By
Louis Casiano
.
EXCERPT:
Chicago and much of the Midwest were plunged into a deep freeze.
.
NOTE: I am sooooo glad I was not yet forced by politicians and their woke “Boards” to buy a Tesla, or any other EV
.
Desperate Tesla owners , in and around Chicago, were seen trying to charge their vehicles with no luck, amid frigid temperatures that have gripped the Midwest.
Charging stations have essentially turned into car graveyards in recent days, as temperatures have dropped to the negative double digits, Fox Chicago reported.
.
“Nothing. No juice. Battery still on zero percent after three hours,” Tyler Beard, who had been trying to recharge his Tesla, at an Oak Brook, Illinois, Tesla supercharging station, since Sunday afternoon, told the news outlet. “And this is like three hours being out here, after being out here three hours yesterday.”
MORE……
Agony…
I reminds me of Edward Munch’s painting of a woman grasping her head in desparation
Schadenfreude after schadenfreude.
In the case of “Tyler Beard” {and other hundreds} – – –
We need to know “the rest of the story.”
Are EVs the only car each of these folks have?
Do they not know the issues with the battery in cold weather?
And do they not know the problems with charging stations?
At 3 p.m. on Sunday, the temperature was -5°F in Oak Brook.
A person would have to have a very good reason (say appendicitis ?)
to be out. {Low IQ, maybe.}
My electric blanket would be on high
The “Great Green Energy Future” takes as a basis fossil fuels are evil, because they emit CO2, even when used to build private planes and yachts, and wind turbines and solar panels, and batteries. That fantasy “Future” has a major disconnect from physical reality.
Natural forces, such as heat from the sun and from volcanic eruptions and gravitation forces of moon and sun, etc., are completely dominating the weather. CO2 IS JUST A MINOR INFLUENCER
.
DEEP OCEAN VOLCANOS CAUSE INCREASED GLOBAL WARMING BY PERIODIC EL NINOs
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/natural-forces-cause-periodic-global-warming
EXCERPT:
Natural Variations of Water Vapor in the Atmosphere Create Unsettled Weather
.
Some people say water vapor is a minor green house gas, or do not even mention it.
Water vapor is a major green house gas
.
Changes in water vapor in the atmosphere have immediate, profound impacts in the weather.
.
The other greenhouse gases gradually increase and their impact is gradual.
.
Water vapor is responsible for about 50% of the 33 C greenhouse effect, or 16.5 C; the other greenhouse gases are allegedly responsible for the other 50%, but the contribution of CO2 is being question by numerous scientists
.
Many such scientists are older, have tenure and are retired. They have decades of experience, have established reputations, are economically secure, and are difficult to intimidate and silence.
.
Rapidly adding 10 to 15% more water vapor to the atmosphere, as during the eruption of Hunga Tonga in January 2022, and gradually adding more water vapor, as during a developing, strong El Nino, that peaked in late 2023, created highly unsettled weather worldwide, typically blamed, in a scare-mongering manner by the IPCC (“the world is boiling”), Media, etc., on the CO2 of fossil fuel. The effects were at least the following:
.
1) Increased local Pacific Ocean water and air temperatures, and increased water vapor,
2) Increased/decreased trade winds,
3) Increased/decreased rain/snowfall,
4) Increased/decreased seasonal monsoons,
5) Ultimately these two events increased the temperature of the entire lower atmosphere by at least 0.3 C in late 2023. See Image 7
.
NOTE: If there were no GHGs, including CO2, water vapor, etc., the planet would not be a comfortable 15 C, but at a very uncomfortable -18 C.
https://climate.nasa.gov/ask-nasa-climate/3143/steamy-relationships-how-atmospheric-water-vapor-amplifies-earths-greenhouse-effect/
The atmosphere cools Earth’s surface
By water vapor trapping reflected low-frequency heat
Water vapor is responsible for about 50% of the 33 C greenhouse effect, or 16.5 C; the other greenhouse gases are allegedly responsible for the other 50%, but the contribution of CO2 is being question by numerous scientists
Listening to people who don’t know what they’re talking about can have disastrous consequences.
China is a warning.
A law was quickly passed in 1959 requiring Chinese citizens to participate in targeting sparrows. Sparrows eat large quantities of locusts.
By 1960, locusts overtook rice crops, limiting the food supply and initiating a famine for the Chinese. The intricate ecosystem of China had been broken, and the consequences were far-reaching for the world’s most populous country
It’s incredible to think a bird weighing less than an average smartphone would be the catalyst to the most devastating famine. Yet, while Mao sought to remove the pests he viewed as insignificant, the importance of the sparrow was overlooked.
At least 15 million died.
How many renewable energy experts know what they are talking about
All of them – just ask them….
Story tip:
https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/chicago-area-tesla-charging-stations-lined-with-dead-cars-in-freezing-cold-a-bunch-of-dead-robots-out-here
Teslas won’t charge in freezing temperatures in Chicago.
Story Tip
Are Environmental Activists Machiavellian?
In recent months, the environmentalist group ‘Just Stop Oil’ has earned a reputation for particularly deranged acts of protest, such as blocking traffic on busy roads and chucking paint over priceless works of art. Could such obstreperous behaviour reflect the personalities of the activists?
In a new study, the psychologist Hannes Zacher explores what he calls the “dark side” of environmental activism. He administered a survey to a sample of 839 Germans in full-time employment. Respondents were asked about their involvement in, and support for, environmental activism. Items included, “In the last six months, I took part in a protest/rally about an environmental issue,” and “I support the actions of the organization ‘Fridays for Future’ [an environmentalist group in Germany]”.
Fine to know it now by scientific research! 😀
Policies arrived at via emotion (Net Zero, Green New Deal) are very hard to change via rational arguments … but IMPLEMENTAION of these policies runs into REALITY which doesn’t argue with you, it just stops you …
You can’t reason with a religious zealot
Davos will have climate on their minds but they seem to have something more important than making money and climate on their minds as Zero Hedge reports:Dark Davos: Escort Services “Completely Booked” As WEF Begins 🙁
Nice to see a bunch of rich, creepy old men doing their bit to close the gender pay gap.
‘Tomorrow we will get “green weather” in Germany:
Southern and central Germany will have nice weather tomorrow, frozen grounds, first snow, up to 25cm and later, with coming warm air from south west rain, freezing on ground, frozen rain.
Traffic will be amazing, cracking trees, overhead lines, icy streets and railways…..
with automatically translated subs
Not much to expect from windmills and solarpanels 😀
Video will get an update in later time, will poste it when it’s available.
Update
So suffering the unintended consequences of renewable energy even if it causes death and economic suicide is OK as long as we can say “we tried”? Marxist propaganda says yes.
Apparently reality and politics live in different universes.
The Net Zero adventures remind me of those rare individuals who thought vegetarianism, veganism and other food isms weren’t radical enough. They had to respect the autonomy of even plants, and so they decided they could fuel their bodies’ energy needs simply by breathing air. Quite soon, they will embarrass themselves by failing to do even that.
Ah yes the Breatharians. Of course they don’t just consume air, they do eat some foods as well. Like all fads from the leftist idjits, it’s a complete con.
There was an article on Fox yesterday about a professor somewhere who had written books on how to do vandalism in defense of the environment.
When asked about people dying because of this sabotage, he replied that such deaths were both inevitable and justifiable.
Simple problem with a simple cause.
The expense of containing Hydrogen is the main limiting factor. It is the smallest of molecules and therefore leaks far more easily than fossil fuel gasses. The cost of the converted infrastructure would be enormous. Any transport fuelled by hydrogen and heavy goods transport would be the biggest user and would be far more inherently dangerous. The cost of production would also be inhibitive.
What we need is a move away from the belief that carbon is the root of all evil – it certainly hasnt been proved anywhere that it is – there isnt even a true correlation. What is needed is investment in fission and fusion. If fusion ends up being unachievable as an energy source then bountiful energy for the future is in doubt. The only back up energy then that is clean, environmentally, is nuclear. We would then need to develop green biomass technology to simply and cheaply produce ethanol/methane to produce the energy required to maintain such a collossal world population. Thanks to the stupidity and lack of scientific ability of the politicians currently in charge, that isnt going to happen any time soon!!
Very nice.
Fire up all fossil fuel and nuclear generators, build new fossil fuel and nuclear generators and remove all wind and solar from the grid.
Certainly a sensible option sans the tech needed for a truly innovative new electrical generation, storage and distribution tech. It’s not a solution that will achieve the goal of cheap energy for America but it will be far cheaper than the current renewables paradigm.
Yet it may very well be, especially in regions like the North East, The mid-Atlantic, Texas, Oklahoma, North and south Dakota, most gulf states, natural gas would be the cheaper option by far. No need to spend the big tax dollars on nuke plants in those regions or anywhere else our natural gas can be piped to.