For a number of years, I’ve been observing demands of activists and promises of politicians that we transition our electrical grid to being supplied mainly by the intermittent renewables, wind and solar, with all large dispatchable sources (fossil fuel and nuclear) banished. Early on, I thought it was obvious that such a transition would inevitably mean that the only way to make the grid function full-time would be energy storage — on a vast scale never before contemplated or attempted.
How much storage, and at what potential cost? This is actually an arithmetic problem, somewhat cumbersome but conceptually very elementary, and easily done with today’s widely-available spreadsheet programs. To help matters along, in December 2022 I produced my energy storage Report (“The Energy Storage Conundrum”), laying out the main options and the calculations involved. My conclusion was that I could not see any way that this could be done at remotely feasible cost. (Anybody who disagrees is welcome to prove me wrong.) Today, if somebody wants to effect an energy transition in a state or country, they can just look to my Report to quickly understand the nature and extent of the energy storage challenge.
What has actually occurred since December 2022 is that our “climate leader” jurisdictions — in the U.S., that would be New York and California — have moved forward with energy storage proposals that any moron can easily see will not work. Both states are in the process of spending huge sums of money on storage capacity that is so small as to be meaningless to address the problem, and at the same time not technically capable of meeting the challenge no matter the cost. Naturally, the federal government is also involved to pick up a big chunk of the wasted cost from its infinite pile of money.
As to New York, a reader sends me a link to this June 2023 federal Department of Energy letter to the New York bureaucrats, approving a loan guarantee for construction of a 300 MW battery storage facility for grid backup. The facility in question is proposed to be placed on some large barges and anchored in the East River in the bay that once was the site of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. In some respects 300 MW is a very large battery storage facility. These are 4-hour duration batteries, so we are talking 1200 MWh of storage. My Report had a picture of a 150 MWh battery storage facility then under development in Queensland, Australia:
This one for New York would be eight times bigger! But would it be a meaningful amount of storage for backing up wind and solar generation? No. My report found, based on calculations from various jurisdictions, that about a month’s worth of storage would be the minimum needed to get through a full year without running out of power. A (30 day) month is 720 hours. New York State’s average electricity demand (from a 2023 NYISO Report linked in my previous post) is about 17,000 MW. So the 1200 MWh battery provides storage to back up the grid for — about 4.2 minutes. To get your 720 hours of backup, you will need about 10,200 of them. Bloomberg NEF gives the average 2024 price of a lithium ion battery as $150 per kWh. So this one 1200 MWh facility will run about $180,000,000 for the batteries alone. (Note that they are putting the batteries on barges and dredging the harbor to make it deep enough to anchor them there. Without doubt the final cost will be well more than double the $180 million.). 10,200 of these at the highly optimistic $180 million each will run close to $2 trillion.
Nobody in New York government is making these simple calculations. Instead, they forge ahead undeterred, without any idea how much storage is needed or how it is going to work or how much it will cost. This August 2023 article from Canary Media says that the Governor has set a goal of 6000 MW of battery storage by 2030:
[Governor Hochul] is pushing to increase the state’s battery storage capacity from about 300 megawatts today to 6,000 megawatts in 2030, to complement an expansive buildout of renewable generation.
As always, they speak of the wrong units, MW instead of MWh. But if these are the usual 4-hour batteries, 6000 MW would be 24,000 MWh. Now we’re up to about an hour and 25 minutes of storage for the State, versus a basic requirement of 720 hours. And that paltry amount will run us (at $150/kWh) at least $3.6 billion.
And California is no more numerate. Here’s a Los Angeles Times piece from October 2023 with figures on California’s plans for battery storage to back up its wind/solar-based grid:
If California is going to meet its ambitious goals to transition from electricity using fossil fuels, the state will need energy storage to shoulder a significant amount of the load. . . . Four years ago, the state counted a mere 250 megawatts of battery storage available to the California Independent System Operator, which manages the grid for 80% of the state and a small part of Nevada. By the end of this year, that number is expected to grow to 8,000 megawatts. And the amount of battery storage integrated fully into the grid is expected to increase to 19,500 megawatts by 2035 and 52,000 megawatts by 2045.
Once again, it’s the usual MW instead of MWh. But assume that that 52,000 MW in 2045 will be 4-hour duration batteries, so 208,000 MWh. At $150/kWh, that will cost California a cool $31.2 billion. And how long will that last if it starts fully charged and the wind is calm at night? This federal Department of Energy webpage gives California’s current annual electricity demand as 259.5 TWh, or 259,500 GWh. Divide by 8760 (hours in a year) and you get average demand of about 30,000 MW. So the 208,000 MWh of storage will last about seven hours. You’ll need about a hundred times that amount — at a cost of $3+ trillion — to get the 720 hours of storage that you will need.
The amounts of storage that they are talking about are so ridiculously inadequate that I won’t even bother getting to the issue of whether these lithium ion batteries can handle the physical task at hand, which in the real world would involve storing energy for a year and more before it is used, without having it drain away. But before closing, I would be remiss not to mention that both the Canary Media and LA Times pieces linked above devote considerable space to the issue of lithium ion battery fires. It seems that in both New York and California, the really tiny amounts of grid-scale battery storage built to date have been plagued by repeated major fires. From New York:
New York state is grappling with how to adjust its ambitious buildout of clean energy storage after fires broke out at three separate battery projects between late May and late July [2023]. . . . First, on May 31, a battery that NextEra Energy Resources had installed at a substation in East Hampton caught fire. . . . Then, on June 26, fire alarms went off at two battery units owned and operated by Convergent Energy and Power in Warwick, Orange County; one of those later caught fire. On July 27, a different Convergent battery at a solar farm in Chaumont caught fire and burned for four days straight.
Funny that these fires don’t seem to be news in the mainstream press. Here from the Canary piece is a picture of the fire at the Chaumont facility:
It’s the same exact story in California — repeated fires at the handful of grid battery storage facilities that have so far gone operational. From the LA Times piece:
[A] persistent problem keeps coming up — fires igniting at battery storage facilities. Most recently, a fire broke out at the Valley Center Energy Storage Facility in San Diego County on Sept. 18 [2023]. Although fire officials said the blaze was put out in about 45 minutes and extinguished by the site’s internal fire prevention system, businesses and the small number of homes within a quarter-mile of the industrial park where the facility is located were evacuated and shelter-in-place orders were in effect within a half-mile of the site. . . . In September 2022, a Tesla Megapack caught fire at a battery storage facility operated by Pacific Gas & Electric in the Northern California town of Moss Landing. No injuries were reported, but California Highway Patrol closed a section of Highway 1 and redirected traffic away from the site for hours.
Just wait until they have 208,000 MWh worth of these things out there.
Shoot, ready, aim! A Democrat approach to any problem. A nice example is a California High Speed Train from Bakersfield to Merced. Where will passengers coma from? Easy, Los Angeles and San Francisco ..
For those who haven’t been following this evolving boondoggle*, the driving distance from Bakersfield to Merced is 164 miles.
As of December 2023,
“Initially estimated around $26 billion, costs for the 171-mile Merced to Bakersfield segment now are estimated as high as $35.3 billion, of which about $25 billion had been secured.”
source: https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/08/overdue-overbudget-high-speed-rail-just-got-3-1-billion-boost-will-trains-ever-roll/
Hmmm . . . $35.3 billion/171 miles = $206 million per mile. WOW, what a deal!
*Following passage of Proposition 1A in 2008, the start of actual construction of the California High Speed Rail System begin in January 2015. Therefore, at the established build rate of 171 miles per 9 years, completion of the planned total of 800 miles of the HSR system will be accomplished no earlier than 2065 . . . and that is discounting the fact that the Bakersfield-Merced segment involved land that was easiest to obtain rights-of-way to and to build upon, having no intermediate stations.
Why use lithium batteries in an application which is not mobile, hence weight is not a factor. It would be better to use a lower cost alternative such as lead acid batteries.
And you know what? A plug in electric hybrid with a lead-acid instead lithium battery probably makes a lot of sense. in the 1970s Jet Industries made an all electric that would go about 50 miles with several golf cart lead acid batteries.
Lithium ion achieves an energy density of 125-600+ Wh/L versus 50-90 Wh/L for lead acid batteries.
if you were to drive the same distance using each type of batteries in an identical vehicle, the lead acid battery cases could take up to 10 times the volume that the lithium ion would, and are also heavier and can’t be packaged inside the passenger compartment.
During normal operation, lithium-ion batteries are sealed systems and do not result in the production and release of gases. This is in contrast to lead-acid batteries, which can produce hydrogen gas during normal operation, specifically charging.
Lithium batteries have to be in a sealed compartment without high heat. That is why some hybrid lithium batteries are under the back seat with vents.
Then there is another issue of capacity to recharge the depleted batteries. If Solar and Wind tank (fall below 5% capacity during a wind lull at night) and the batteries get depleted, the next day when he sun returns you not only need sufficient Solar to power your city but also enough to recharge the battery while Solar is productive (presuming the wind is still at a standstill during a Summer or Winter blocking high pressure situation)
Likely you would need not only 200% of demand as Wind Capacity but also 200% of demand as solar capacity
I doubt 200% would be enough.
Yes, there’s that nasty little capacity factor issue that makes wind require 300% more generation just to provide nameplate for 1/3 of capacity and likewise Solar would require 400% nameplate in summer and 800% nameplate in winter just co meet 100% of demand
But then again, with solar you need the capacity to gather and the battery capacity to store the energy during available solar time 10am until 2 pm local time so it can be used when needed … Which generally isn’t when it can be harvested.
Take into account the temperature effects and the problem gets worse.
If it gets cold enough, the batteries can not be charged.
If the batteries freeze and attempts made to charge them, they burn.
If the batteries are fully depleted, their working capacity is far below their new build ratings.
It used to be true that lead-acid batteries released hydrogen during charging. The batteries always had a water fill cap for each cell. Even when the technology went to “sealed” batteries the water fill capacity still existed and, at least for many of the batteries, adding water fairly often to compensate for loss was necessary.
However, for the past 20+ years that is not true, at least for many lead-acid batteries. The original Toyota battery on my 2023 provided no way to add water. The battery lasted for 11 years. The Walmart replacement was the same construction and lasted 9 years. The current batter, of another brand, also has no option to check or add to the fluid. If Hydrogen was being vented it would not work unless in some magic way replacement hydrogen was being created at the same time.
I thought they only released hydrogen when they were over charged.
“Sealed” lead-acid batteries normally do not consume water or release hydrogen, but they’re still somewhat dangerous in unusual conditions, such as a charger failure that allows overcharging, or a car crash. I don’t know if there is a practical concern that hydrogen could reach dangerous concentrations in a ventilated passenger compartment, but I would not like sharing the passenger compartment with anything that can leak concentrated sulfuric acid under _any_ conditions.
re: “Why use lithium batteries in …”
High useful cycle count, and high energy density.At this point, they can’t be be compared to.Lead acid batts.
Battery energy density doesn’t begin to compare to the energy density nature has provided in Coal, Gas, Oil or Nuclear
Plus, those batteries don’t last long before their capacity begins degrading.
The only thing FREE about renewable energy is the energy source…the remainder is costly, environmentally damaging and unsustainable given the amount of materials mining required
Well, energy density of the fuel source is only a small part of the story . . . a very significant factor is the size and weight of the power plant needed to convert, say, 100 lbs of the raw energetic fuel substance into useable energy/power.
A gasoline powered ICE is very efficient in this sense . . . able to be contained in less than 20 ft^3 and at less than 1000 lbs weight . . . a nuclear reactor, not so efficient even though the energy theoretically extractable from 100 pounds of U-235 is stupendous compared to that in 100 pounds of gasoline,
“It would be better to use a lower cost alternative”. It might be worthwhile calculating how much these projects will reduce the global temperature. Isn’t that the goal?
They won’t reduce temperatures by any measurable amount but they will reduce available supply on any given day as well as City/State/Federal coffers to pay out all the subsidies the mines will demand
We could just wait until sufficient nuclear comes on line. This frantic spending for tiny marginal benefits makes no sense at all. This “something must be done” spending smacks of scams, get rich quick schemes.
Big Green
SnakeSolar Oil Salesmen working the Long Con mining subsidies faster than Bitcoin Miners harvest digital currencyFlow batteries would be a better bet for stationary power.
If they are ever perfected and go into full production at a competitive price. Flow batteries so far have been one of those things like fusion power, eternally just ahead. E.g., the Wikipedia article’s most significant graph is one of publications per year. Not of working designs or units produced, but of academic papers and patent applications. It’s been rising sharply since about 2008.
That _could_ mean a lot of investment or work that will soon pay off in mass-producible designs, but I’m sure there are also heaps and heaps of research papers published by graduate students and professors just to be publishing something, and all of these are narrowly focused on just one small piece of all the pieces needed for a practical design. It’s a weakness in the academic research model that it favors impractically narrow concentration over putting the pieces together, or even ensuring all the pieces are present. When you advance one tiny piece, you leave room for many more research papers. When you solve the whole thing, you may have to start at the beginning on something else.
Maybe even better for long-term battery backup: iron-nickel (Edison) batteries. The energy density is even lower, but that doesn’t matter in a fixed site, and they never wear out from charge/discharge cycles. Charge and discharge are slow, but if you were genuinely trying to backup the full output of wind or solar power, a 24 hour charge and discharge cycle is fine. OTOH, I suspect that deployment of these in quantities needed for full-grid backup would require a great expansion of world-wide nickel production. Lithium may also be needed; it does not contribute to the basic chemistry, but somehow improves the performance of the batteries.
OTOH, there is no technology at all where a full grid backup is affordable. If the real goal is just to cover for a cloud crossing the solar cells, or to give a few minutes of coverage while turbines spin up in a fossil-fuel plant that had been maintained at full temperature until needed, you need faster charge and much, much faster discharge, like using 50% of the capacity in 15 minutes. Lead-acid is good at that – even a small battery outputs the huge current needed to start a car. And lead-acid batteries require no materials that are exotic or in limited supply, although some closed lead mines and smelters might have to be reopened.
The numbers in the article are a total Bull Manure
” Bloomberg NEF gives the average 2024 price of a lithium ion battery as $150 per kWh.”
Tesla’s Megapack website has much higher prices. Tesla is a world leader in storage and mass produces Megapacks. Tesla recommends using only 0.6 of design capacity, to achieve 15-y life with normal aging.
Example of Turnkey Cost of Large-Scale, Megapack Battery System, 2023 pricing
?itok=lxTa2SlF
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/battery-system-capital-costs-losses-and-aging
The system consists of 50 Megapack 2, rated 45.3 MW/181.9 MWh, 4-h energy delivery
Power = 50 Megapacks x 0.979 MW x 0.926, Tesla design factor = 45.3 MW
Energy = 50 Megapacks x 3.916 MWh x 0.929, Tesla design factor = 181.9 MWh
Estimate of supply by Tesla, $90 million, or $495/kWh. See URL
Estimate of supply by Others, $14.5 million, or $80/kWh
All-in, turnkey cost about $575/kWh; 2023 pricing
https://www.tesla.com/megapack/design
https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/tesla-hikes-megapack-prices-commodity-inflation-soars
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) 19% 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. The excluded costs add at least 10 – 15 c/kWh
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 excessively charged/discharged the system. After a few years, 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
NOTE 3: If a 24-h system, each parallel train would have 10 units x 4 h/unit x 0.6, Tesla limit = 24 h. Above example would have 50 x 6 = 300 Megapacks for energy (MWh). Tesla design factors would apply.
COMMENTS ON CALCULATION
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 EIA annual reports, almost all battery systems have throughputs less than 10%. I chose 10% for calculations.
A few battery systems have higher throughputs, if they are used to absorb midday solar and discharge it during peak hour periods of late-afternoon/early-evening.
They may reach up to 40% throughput. I chose 40% for 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 system 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 0.6 of design capacity is a key point, as the V vs Charge for a Li-ion cell is pretty flat between 0.2 charge and 0.8 charge. The drop off below 0.2 charge and above 0.8 charge involve some not so nice things in the battery chemistry and going outside those limits greatly reduces cycle life. OTOH, the full range could be used occasionally.
Comment on the article itself is that I’m glad I am not the only one ticked off by the lack of distinction between MW and MWH. I would also opine that assuming 4 hours of storage may be generous.
“Estimated supply by others”
Must be a euphemism for Cheap Chinese Crap that will last about 5 minutes longer than the warranty
4 hours of electricity delivery is a Tesla standard.
for a 24-h system, you need 10 units in series. See above note
for a 96 MW system, you need 24 such series set-ups, if a Megapack is 4 MW
A total of 240 units. Yikes
The cost of long-term storage, say a “magical” month of storage, is totally off-the-charts
Uhhh . . . placing battery packs in series makes their end-to-end voltage additive. A single tesla Powerwall 3 battery unit is charged/discharged at 211-264 vdc, so if one placed 10 such units in series, the average total output voltage across those units would be about 2,400 vdc.
I do believe you meant to refer to placing the units in parallel, not in series, so as to provide the kWh of power capacity over time.
Thank you
I will revise my article
You need both MW rating and MWhr of storage. The inability of utilities and others to fully articulate this need is very bothersome — the engineers must know better.
Achieve the MWhr for even 36 hours of backup – one heavily overcast day and the nights before and after, with any battery with a charge/discharge cycle under 12 hours – and the MW will take care of itself. That is, if you’re actually aiming to back up wind or solar power with anything but iron-nickel batteries or flow batteries, you will be installing batteries capable of supplying much more than the peak power requirement for a few hours.
But I suspect the MW obsession is because deep down they know the cost of batteries that will carry the grid through any large spread loss of wind or solar is utterly inconceivable. What they’re actually aiming for is enough backup that just a few minute ripple in the wind speed or a cloud passing across the sun won’t cause a short brownout and reveal the basic incapacity of wind and solar to the masses that just want power when they flip a switch – <i>every time</i>. For that, MW is more important than MWhr, because no large battery will run down in under 15 minutes.
That’s why Lithium-Ion should no longer be what’s going into grid scale backup. They should be using Lithium-Iron-Phosphate. It’s a much more robust chemistry that tolerates much higher charge and discharge amounts, near 100% to 0%. A 100 amp-hour rated LiFePo4 battery will actually deliver near 100 amp-hours of power where a Lead-Acid of the same rating will weigh twice as much and the best will provide not much over 50 amp-hours before it hits minimum safe state of charge.
The LFP battery, in 4680 format, for Megapack, was announced in Jan 2023, but first Tesla needs to build additional battery plant capacity, then,,,
https://insideevs.com/news/635844/tesla-4680-battery-cells-megapacks-lfp/
LFP is less costly, and less likely to catch fire, but produces less power to the wheels per kWh in the battery.
Therefore, the Model Y range was reduced after LFP
I would like to see the test curves, of LFP having less friction/greater efficiency at less than 20% and more than 80% charging/discharging, before making pronouncements.
Teslas with LFP batteries should be charged to 100% full, which gives the BMS a data point to calculate elapsed miles, and miles left, which is a little tricky, because the cell voltage is flattish for a big charge range, unlike Li-ion.
That should be done may be once a month, for recalibration
Then, you should drive until 20% full, and recharge to 100% full, etc.
Some people may take a week, or more, to reach 20% full, which is fine.
If 100% full and you drive a little to 90% full, then do not plug in to get to 100% full, because you will continually be in dentrite-growing territory, which should be avoided like the plague.
If you do not charge to 100% full, but charge to 90% full, you permanently stay out of dentrite territory
The aging of LFP is similar to Li-ion, although the jury is out on that.
The same applies to large scale systems
That position is currently highly debatable.
For EV use, the more popular batteries are NMC (lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxide) and NCA (lithium nickel cobalt aluminum oxides). LFP batteries are about 30% less energy dense, so one might expect to get the same range in an LFP pack as you would in a NCA pack you would need around 30% more battery volume and mass. However, that theoretical disadvantages is offset by the fact that you can—and should—charge LFP batteries to 100% state of charge, not 80% as is recommended for NMC/NCA batteries for maximum life, as you correctly noted.
Also, LFP batteries have generally lower charging rates (i.e., longer recharge times) in cold weather compared to their cobalt-containing cousins. Supposedly, this can be mitigated by an “intelligent” battery thermal management system warming the battery pack before charging, but there is little real-world experience to show this is practical.
I have in my house solar LFP’s and they are great. 2 years in service, already paid their value with quite low electricity prices 0,16E/kWh. And not so great central Europe solar weather.
Looks like safer and probably cheaper alternative is Sodium batteries. I have already 18650 sample at home and checked them. Their biggest problem is huge spread of voltage, they can handle 0V and their normal range is 1,5V – 4,1V. There is no inverter which can use them fully. Most probably some DC-DC converter is needed.
I like most LTO chemistry, Lithium Titan Oxide. I have samples too and tortured them a lot. They are great, they have only two cons, 1. High price and 2. Low energy density around 80Wh/kg.
Density is not problem with stationary applications, price is.
Although they are claimed to do 20,000-30,000 cycles and 30 years.
They are really safe, I personally shorted one to death and only result was that battery shrink wrap melted and battery went high resistance e.g. brick. Second one shorted survived, shrink wrap melted, but battery is still functional.
They also support high currents, there are LTO’s supporting 20C current.
You must mean sodium-ion batteries, which substitute sodium for lithium. Sodium is almost 4 times the mass, so it’s definitely inferior for automotive and other portable applications, but when weight doesn’t matter, the only issue is what else has to be changed to account for the chemical differences between sodium and lithium.
I hadn’t heard of those before, so at first I thought you were talking about sodium-sulfur or another molten-salt chemistry – these have seemed promising for a long time, until one thinks about the safety aspects of a battery filled with molten metal and molten sulfur at scalding temperatures, and that metal spontaneously ignites in air and produces heat, hydrogen gas, and lye if someone tries to cool the fire with water.
Thanks for this, very interesting.
It is an eye opener for most lay people, and to many engineers, who do not understand the economics of business projects.
Then there is the question of earning an income. If a battery can get a highly protected access to ancillary markets, it may be able to make a large fortune from them, as happened for the Hornsdale Power reserve in South Australia in its early years. The margins were so great at times that they clearly didn’t worry about degrading battery life, and in fact, in just 3 years they had to replace many of the original battery packs. It now looks as though they are struggling again with degraded round trip efficiency. Competition is also eroding revenues now that other large batteries have started up.
Its earnings have gone really flat.
That chart shows cumulative income. It means that virtually no income is being earned now.
Competitive pressures and the system performing at lower levels, due to past abuse, per operating results in Image
The discrepancy may be estimates using just batteries or batteries plus all supporting facilities but who knows? Just batteries is definitely BS. Endless happy talk is the definition of most of this.
A discrepancy of $150/kWh for just batteries, whereas a turnkey system is $585/kWh, 2023 pricing?
Bloomberg is downright lying or ignorant
lying and ignorant cannot be dismissed out of hand.
A 15 year life? When coal, oil, gas, nuclear, and hydropower can last 50+ years with good maintenance.
Nuclear at 60 years is the design life for the newer plants started in the past 10 years in China, Russia, Korea, and their exported plants.
The Mass Media has been told not to spread that info, for fear the wind/solar subsidy bonanza might be impaired.
60 year design lifetime goes back much further than the last 10 years. The two original reactors at Plant Vogtle (1987, 1989) are already licensed for 60 years and I’m told they plan to apply for additional 20 year extensions, for 80 years total operation.
re: “Just wait until they have 208,000 MWh worth of these things out there.”
Um, where will they put them all? Will they be adjunct/part of (like in the basement of industrial) buildings like where some substations are in New York?
The basements of industrial buildings? That’s the last place you’d want them!
Put them all at the southern tip of Manhattan… Battery Park
If the businesses have been supporters of wind/solar, then that is precisely where I’d want them.
I’d prefer under government buildings. Don’t get caught blocking the exits!
Manhattan has plenty of empty commercial office space and the New York city/state government is busy producing more of it.
Wonder if long term energy demand forecasts take that into account?
Knowing these Malthusian psychopaths, they’ll put them under stack and pack housing.
Back in the days that ConEd was providing DC power, many of the substations did indeed have a battery capable of supplying power for 30 minutes to an hour. They were also used for smoothing demand on the generating stations.
If the plumes of toxic smoke filling the air are GREEN, does that count as “Green?”
They don’t care. The more money wasted the closer they come to their goal of bankrupting governments of energy and economy.
The advantage of using barges is that if/when a battery catches fire the barge can be scuttled
Leading to a rather large steam explosion. Along with lithium hydroxide (very caustic) pollution. Plus, God only knows what is in the bottom sediments from last century when the Navy was NOT concerned very much with what got dumped into the harbor waters.
Along with lithium hydroxide (very caustic) pollution.
But no CO2 🙂
I was worried for a minute.
Scuttling won’t work unless the depth of water under the barge is deep enough to cover the whole barge and I see that they will have to dredge the area where the barges will be moored. I bet they will give just a foot or two of underkeel clearance.
Thanks again Francis.
You and many others who think things through rationally have told “the authorities” many times over that their dreams about battery backup are really nightmares.
Their responses remind me of that old joke where a 96 year old man (NY power authorities?) goes to his doctor (Manhattan Contrarian?) and asks for a Viagra prescription, after telling the doctor his situation with an impending new young bride (electricity consumers?).
His doctor warns him: “Given the length of time that you have abstained from sex, I’ve got to warn you – sex could prove to be fatal.”.
“Doc”, says the old man, “if she dies, she dies”.
Innumeracy seems to be a prerequisite for NY and CA politicians. They cannot do simple battery arithmetic.
There is only one solution to renewable intermittency—fossil fuel fired backup. And given renewable capacity factors, it will have to be used about 70-75% of the time.
Rud: Very true. When I’ve explained the basics of the battery storage problem and why it won’t work to true believers, the typical response is “OK, then we’ll use hydrogen.” At that point it’s best to just shake your head and walk way.
They can’t count money – you expect them to do anything more complicated?
And that’s all that needs to be said.
OK, they’ve got a good lead, but what state’s politicians are not close behind? Texas has a lot of grid-damaging windmills. My state (Nevada) flash-fries a lot of birds in mid-flight. There are way too many other examples of state politicians doing their best to destroy avian (and bat) life as well as forests and farmland to obtain unreliable (and virtually useless) electrical power.
Those massive battery farms would act as giant magnets…for terrorists. But apparently they already have a habit of burning up on their own, so I guess it wouldn’t matter.
Operate them remotely and make the entrances one-way, and maybe they’d serve a useful purpose. Also, when politicians want a tour, welcome them and appoint your company DEI people as guides.
“What does this big red button do?”
“I dunno, why not press it and see.”
Let’s not forget that the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide does not matter.
Actually it does. Below 150ppm photosynthesis stops and everything dies.
Very nice.
Government must be removed from all energy production and transmission. Governments lie and cheat with no accountability. If all the money pissed away on energy transition had been spent on fossil fuel and nuclear generation and upgrades to the grid we would have reliable, affordable and constant energy for all.
Here in the UK the government is to become the sole shareholder in NESO, the hived out grid sytem operator in July. The pattern of ownership and dictatorship is basically exactly similar to that for Network Rail, which most would reckon to be a disaster. They will of course be commanded to do everything net zero, whatever the cost.
Government has a role as regulator and by that I mean lightly regulate. When government s in charge of generation and transmission there is no one to regulate them. No entity should be self regulated.
That is the root difference between socialism and capitalism.
In capitalism, the captains of the economy must comply with regulations made by politicians.
In socialism, the politicians make rules and dictate the economy.
The term oligarch comes to mind…..
Under capitalism, businesses answer to their customers.
Under socialism, businesses answer to the politicians.
Arizona trying to catch up, Arizona Public Service just broke ground on 200 MW battery storage. It all makes since to help with the duck load curve, except for that economics thingy.
Grr, I can’t make sense!
“15-y life with normal aging ”
It seems likely for the first installed to need replacing before the last of the planned ones to be hooked up.
An analogy is something like drinking beer.
What I’m I missing?
You’re not missing anything. I’ve often said with large installations of wind turbines, solar panels, or batteries it becomes a geometric problem that can’t be solved.
Why make batteries when you could make fuel At least hydrogen makes some sort of sense, but not enough sense. Hydrogen is low-density difficult and dangerous. Why not use solar and wind power to make a higher energy-density fuel that we are already familiar with and that we already have infrastructure for. Methane, for example. Or, even better again, ditch wind and solar altogether and use a high density fuel of which there is already thousands of years’ supply – Uranium.
Incidentally, don’t mock the Australian opposition for backing nuclear. Yes, as things stand Australia will be speaking Mandarin decades before a nuclear power station can even get approval, but those things can change fast once the greens are swept out of the way. We could do things once. It has to be possible to do things again
Hydrogen isn’t a fuel. It’s a means of conversion of one form of energy to another which can be stored. Take the most efficient electrolysis process to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, and the most efficient method of using that hydrogen to generate electricity. There’s a bunch of energy loss both ways.
It’s even worse when the hydrogen is sourced from a fuel, usually methane. Expend energy to take hydrogen from a fuel then use the hydrogen to produce a lot less electricity than just burning the methane in a turbine connected to a generator could produce. It’s akin to breaking apart carbon-zinc batteries to extract the carbon rods to burn for heat and declaring “Look at this nice energy source!”.
A fuel has energy intrinsically bound up in it. A profitable fuel requires less energy to refine, prepare, etc than the energy that can be extracted from it, typically by combusting it with oxygen.
For example, assume it takes 1,000 megawatt-hours of energy input to refine a volume of gasoline that contains 5,000 megawatt-hours worth of energy. That 5,000 megawatt-hours was already “built into” the molecules of the gasoline – it just had to be “sifted out” (distilled) from all the non-gasoline components of crude oil.
But assume the numbers went the other way. Taking 5,000 megawatt-hours of energy input to distill a volume of gasoline that holds a mere 1,000 megawatt-hours of energy.
Nobody would bother doing that. Yet they want to do that with Hydrogen. Use considerably more energy to extract hydrogen from water or fuels or plant matter or ??? than can be recovered by combining the hydrogen with oxygen in fuel cells, combustion or whatever technology might be being developed.
No matter what, the amount of energy out of the process is less than what went in because the hydrogen has no “built in” energy on its own, only the potential energy *put into it* by the process of ripping its atoms loose from other elements it was bound up with.
The best places for hydrogen atoms in electricity generation are as part of the molecules of water used in cooling nuclear reactors, hydrocarbon fuels that get combusted with the oxygen in air, water heated to steam (for steam turbines) by nuclear or hydrocarbon fuels, or in the water that flows through turbines in hydro-electric dams.
“Hydrogen isn’t a fuel. It’s a means of conversion of one form of energy to another which can be stored” at a 50% loss.
MIT came up with a viable method, similar to photosynthesis, that uses sunlight to convert CO2 and water to methane.
A methane power plant launched in the southern USA (forget which State and am disinclined to look it up), that recycled CO2 and achieved net zero CO2 emissions.
Seems like either of those is better than batteries. Methane steam turbine generators take up a fraction of the real estate compared to solar or wind farms and produce 24/7.
Are these meant to supply power in a blackout or simply as Grid Balancing efforts?
Kip: If you have a strictly wind/solar grid, you’d have a blackout every calm night. Your backup system would need to provide 100% of the power more than half the time – wouldn’t that make it your primary source?
Dunno but the article does sound like the potential for nightly discharge and daily recharge
In NYC, the aim (poor aim at that!) is to replace the gas-fired peaker plants. Here is one article that puts it that way.
https://www.energy-storage.news/bess-projects-represent-encouraging-progress-in-new-york-efforts-to-replace-dirty-and-polluting-peakers/
If they think putting out an EV battery is hard using lots of water, what kind of plans will be necessary to combat a fire at one of these large battery sites with fire spreading to other batteries? The Greenies are running full speed ahead with this while having no idea how foolish and inadequate it will be.
The solution is to either spread the individual batteries out, so that they aren’t near each other. Or provide huge amounts of insulation between individual battery packs.
Either option will increase costs by a very large amount.
I think you miss the point.
It is a big lie. It is never intended to work.
Like California’s high speed rail to nowhere or the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Ukraine.
Milk the taxpayer and direct funds to cronies. Be out of office before it falls apart.
Collect your 10’s to 100’s of millions (depending on if it is a local, state or federal scam) on the back end with phony directorships, book/move ideals (that never make a dollar) and various other plausibly deniable grift opportunities.
Alas The Australian online news reports today 11th March 2024-
One of Australia’s biggest superannuation operators, the $124bn UniSuper, has been hit with a massive plunge from its green fund, with its assets diving 28 per cent since June after being exposed to a raft of electric vehicle and battery makers, including Tesla.
From assets under management of $2.5bn in mid-2023, UniSuper’s Global Environmental Opportunities Fund — perhaps the greenest superannuation strategy in the market, and the most concentrated — has lost $700m, or a third of its value, largely on the back of weakness in the EV market.
The industry super fund giant primarily looks after the retirement savings of the nation’s academics, scientists and researchers and opened to the public three years ago.
Would those academics scientists and researchers not affected please check on their associate’s wellbeing as they may also be underwater with novated leases on their Teslas with like depreciation and could be triggered to bring forward the dooming.
“Just wait until they have 208,000 MWh worth of these things out there.”
In keeping with the practice of alarmism, it’s worth noting that 208,000 MWh stored in a battery is the equivalent to the energy released by a 178.967 kiloton nuclear bomb. In this case, however, a destructive event by a malfunctioning big battery is far more likely than any imaginary climate catastrophe.
Friday evening in the National Grid Fuhrer Bunker-
Hey Super we’ve just got a whole street blacked out in North London
How many homes?
Looks like 20 max in the street.
Egads it’s 6:45 and I’ll be late for the Tinder hookup. Gotta go so you close up and avagoodweekend!
National Grid to axe out-of-hours repair callouts because ‘it’s cheaper to pay the fines’ (msn.com)
An incredibly expensive and unworkable solution to a non-existent problem
I assume this is based on today’s demand…..which I assume is bound to increase significantly.
17x in some places just to support the new huge data centers, or another Al Gore sized estate.
Dear Manhattan Contrarian,
Overall, an excellent writeup.
One small correction: the wind does blow at night. In fact, this is a major problem because demand is at its lowest at night as well. So besides the storage problem, there is the overcapacity problem: you need multiples of MW of wind or solar to match 1 MW of fossil fuel or nuclear – which in turn creates regular situations where there is more electricity than anybody wants. The Southwest Power Pool interstate grid – the SPP – which runs from the northern edge of North Dakota down to North Texas, had too much power in the form of negative electricity prices more than 15% of the time in 2022.
Solar doesn’t work at night, but the multiples vs. dispatchable issue exists for solar as well. It is simply less of an issue because solar/sun at least tends to coincide with summer peak demand periods, but is offset by the reality of severe seasonal production differences (i.e. winter vs. summer). A winter storm would hit both solar and wind – too little sun for solar and too much wind for turbines, so storage would have to replace solar+wind production for multiple days during such events.
In any case, keep up the good work!
Around here, the wind almost always dies down as the sun goes down. Unless there is a thunderstorm nearby.
The daily peak for electricity demand is usually around 5 to 6pm, solar peaks closer to 1 to 2pm. Demand for electricity is higher at noon than it is at midnight, during the summer, but it does not coincide with the peak.
In the winter, the peak demand is often around dawn, when temperatures are the coldest.
Still looking for the Holy Grail (Battery/ Ambient SCMES) for all-scale electrical storage applications. Until then, climate change will drive the taxpayer boondoggle of a political movement that has altered it’s own reality by believing it’s own propaganda
Just order the batteries from ACME and have Wile E. Coyote install them.
Lithium batteries make great hand warmers.
Missing from the cost analysis is how much it will cost to extinguish the fires. The cost is non-trivial and includes the cost of firefighting, the health costs to the local population, and the environmental cleanup costs.
One never sees those items on a tally sheet.
Let’s save time and money. Can’t we just give the national, regional and local politicians their requisite graft, and then clean-burn the left over Clean Energy designated money? After all is said and done this will save taxpayers some money, prevent the pollution caused by the Clean Energy battery fires, save valuable Fire Department and Police Department resources (taxpayer $$ saved again). Let’s talk about it: The White Elephant in the room… is that Clean Energy is in fact the latest in political graft processes to screw Americans out of money, power, freedom, and control.
It’s so easy to get down on plans for battery storage given the apparent lack of awareness of the laws of physics and economics, the obvious failure to plan beyond the next bathroom break, the craven involvement of vested interests looking to suck on the taxpayer teat, the clear evidence of a decline in the collective political IQ of those in charge to the level of a squid (my apologies to cephalopods) and the evidence from jurisdictions that boldly (or blindly?) took the initiative and dove into the shallow end of the pool headfirst before anyone else bringing the inevitable chaos that was long predicted but…
we may be missing an opportunity here to turn this into something really great. My city has built some very productive cogen plants which not only produce reliable electricity, but also provide waste heat for other users thus solving two needs with one resource. It strikes me that when large scale battery farms are not feeding endless free electricity to the grid during those rare occasions when the sun goes down or the wind doesn’t blow, we could be harvesting the waste heat from the inevitable battery fires to run a chain of really good smoke houses so everyone can have their fill of brisket and pulled pork (kale and nettle juice smoothies for the vegans).