David Wojick
Below I show how the Green New Deal can cause the average household electricity bill to go up a crushing $52,500. The reason is simple. Wind and solar require a lot of battery backup and we use a tremendous amount of electricity so the cost of all these batteries is many trillions of dollars.
Here is the basic derivation. It is kept simple and the numbers are all rounded off so they can be remembered. (The U.S. Energy Department should have done a detailed analysis long ago.)
— The electricity storage capacity required to replace today’s fossil fueled electricity generation nationwide with intermittent wind and solar is 250,000 MWh.
— Assume grid scale battery facilities cost $300,000 per MWh of storage capacity. (Today’s cost is higher.)
— Thus the capital cost of this storage is 75 trillion dollars.
— Spreading this cost over 20 years gives an annual cost of 3.75 trillion dollars.
— U.S. household electricity usage is 1.5 trillion KWh per year.
— Thus the household cost is $2.50 per KWh.
— Average household usage is 10,500 KWh/yr.
— Thus the annual household cost of this storage capacity is $26,250.
— Today’s average annual electric bill is $1,800.
— Thus the electricity cost increase is over 14 times as much.
In short everyone’s electricity bill will be 14 times greater than today if wind and solar replace today’s fossil fuel powered generation under the Green New Deal.
This will be true of industrial and commercial consumers as well which will drive up the cost of virtually all goods and services. This impact is truly inflationary.
But this does include the electrification of transportation and gas heat which are also part of the Green New Deal. Electrification is often estimated to roughly double the amount of electricity generated.
— Given electrification the cost of electricity might jump a whopping 28 times today’s cost. The Green New Deal causes the average household electricity bill to go up a crushing $52,500.
Of course the economy would likely collapse before this happened but this simple analysis is the necessary starting point for thinking about the incredible cost impact of the Green New Deal.
There are lots of technical refinements to be added to this analysis to make it a good engineering cost estimate. Some make the numbers go down others make them go up. I would love to see this done and would happily help.
For example the cost of batteries might go down a lot and there are studies that project this. Given that the material requirements for this vast amount of batteries greatly exceed our present mining and manufacturing capacity this may be unlikely but it is not impossible.
On the other hand this simple analysis assumes batteries charge and discharge from zero to 100% of capacity. If it is actually 10-90 or 20-80 then a great deal more storage capacity will be needed.
Then too the storage requirement can be reduced by overbuilding the wind and solar generating capacity. However this reduction is limited, I have been told to 180 million MWh, because there is still no solar at night and no wind when it does not blow hard enough.
But it is unlikely that these giant batteries have an average full performance life of 20 years.
Note too that this analysis does not include the cost of the enormous amount of wind and solar generating facilities. Nor does it include the cost of borrowing trillions of dollars.
The basic point is that the Green New Deal is impossibly expensive. There is no cure for intermittency.
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Actual US electricity consumption is about 4 trillion KWh per year
1.5 is residential.
The other 2.5 is needed for US jobs and commerce, without which people would not be able to afford their homes
Yes I mention this toward the end.
please note that 250,000 MW is a typo! Should be 250,000,000 MWh which the math is based on. Sorry.
Electricity is incredibly cheap at 2.50/KWh. I’m paying over 4x that here in Canada.
Get a new Prime Minister.
So!
You’re not. The Northwest Territories has the most expensive electricity averaging $0.41/kWh.
Top rate in Ontario is 18.2¢ per kWh…where do you live?
Canada?
Do’t you mean Cubanada,
under Fidel TrueDope?
Those are dollars, not cents.
As we edge ever closer to 1973 Dystopian classic in 2024 with the Soylent Green New Deal
True, but, as I occasionally note, Ma always told me to eat all the Greens.
David one question for clarification
You stated “— The electricity storage capacity required to replace today’s fossil fueled electricity generation nationwide with intermittent wind and solar is 250,000 MWh.”
can you let us know approximately how many hours the 250,000 mwh that storage would cover?
Ie would it provide electricity for how long in the event of zero electric production from wind solar or water or nuclear?
ap0ologies if the phrasing of my question is unclear.
Thanks
Joe
At 12KWh per person per day and 340M people I get 4,080MWh a day residential (people though not energy intensive businesses)
For the US
You dropped three zeros in your multiplication. Should be 4,080 GigaWatt-hours.
Oops
US current average demand is 477GW. So a 250,000MWh battery gives 31 minutes. This is way tool. A 50 hour battery is around the optimum but that requires a lot of overbuild or some dispatchable generation.
His sums are bad because he losers and gains zeros. Actual power cost of China supplied all the gear would be around 3 times the present level not 28.
250,000 is a typo! Should be 250,000,000 MWh which the math is based on. Sorry.
joe-Dallas, this is somewhat non-question, as this depends entirely on how much power is being used, because kilowatthours are the product of kilowatts and time (similar for megawatthours, watthours and so on). So, for example, if you have a battery capable of storing 250000 MWh (250 GWh) of energy, and the demand is (assume for the purpose of this example, that the demand is continuously constant) 250000 kW of power, then the battery will last 1000 hours. Of course, as David pointed out, assuming the battery will discharge from 100% to 0%.
The 250 million is not for a single event. This is explained in sections 1.A and B here: http://www.cfact.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/WOJICKREPORT.pdf
The storage actually accumulates over the year.
Here is the gist:
“We now have a powerful new analysis of the long-term storage requirements for making solar and wind reliable. As expected the numbers are enormous. They are also precise.
The study is “The Cost of Net Zero Electrification of the U.S.A.” by engineer Ken Gregory.
As the title says, Gregory’s study focuses on net zero electrification, which is not my focus here. His very first step is to analyze what storage would be required to simply meet today’s electric power needs using solar and wind instead of fossil fuels. This simple analysis is a big breakthrough.
The scale is one year of solar and wind replacing American fossil fueled generation in the lower 48 states. The approach is elegant in its powerful simplicity. Here is how it works.
Fossil fuels power roughly a conveniently round 3 billion MWh a year. Gregory starts with the hour by hour solar and wind generation for 2019 and 2020. Hourly total generation captures the continual intermittency at the hourly scale. There is a lot of generation up and down at that scale. Wind and daytime clouds both come and go a lot.
This is a huge advance over the typical one-year analysis, which uses annual averages. It also goes way beyond the kind of short-term storage study that I and others have done. In fact, it turns out that seasonal storage is the big driver.
The key step is that Gregory scales up each of the two sample years’ hourly generation profiles to generate as much power as fossil fuels did that year. He uses a simple multiplier to do this. Each year is a bit different, but the multiplier is about seven. That is, fossil fuels generated about seven times as much juice as solar and wind, so we up the solar and wind profile that much, as though it were doing the job. Non-fossil sources like hydro and nuclear are left as is.
He then compares the scaled up solar and wind generation with the hour-by-hour usage of electricity (technically called demand, as though we could demand electricity). Gregory analyzes the hour by hour solar and wind generation, versus the usage, to see how much storage is required to make solar and wind work. He does not count up storage that is replenished, then used again, rather he is just looking for the maximum required capacity. (These two different things — amount stored and storage capacity — are often confused because both are measured in MWh.)”
“The key step is that Gregory scales up each of the two sample years’ hourly generation profiles to generate as much power as fossil fuels did that year.”
And that is exactly the fallacy. To achieve that, FF had over twice as much generating capacity as actual generation. They need to, in order to meet the seasonal peaks, as well as provide for generator failures. But he restricted S&W capacity to just provision of the average. That meant that battery storage had to cover the whole seasonal variation. Months.That is where these huge sums come from. It isn’t from the much smaller storage needed to cover days without wind.
The analysis is done properly here. The cost is about $5T, not $250T. And of course that assumes total reliance on battery storage, and not the much cheaper variants of hydro.
Did the study take into account the fact that wind can vary by 20% or more, in multi-month to year long scales, at continent wide scales? Europe has seen this at least twice since 2020.
This variability also affects storage: batteries recharge on fixed current but generation is spiky. As such, curtailment is still going to happen.
Then there’s usage vs. generation mismatch vs. variability – a problem nobody is going to solve. Wind blows a lot at midnight – the theoretical good news is that you can use that for battery charging but the bad news is that it is highly variable. It is the same for solar during the middle of the day/nadir of the duck curve – in theory, you can use the excess solar PV electricity to charge batteries. In reality, midday electrical flows are simply different than duck curve peaks so transmission capacity is often choked. So add on likely extra grid costs over and above the extra needed for connecting the vast acres of solar PV and wind.
Next is the non-zero battery storage “up in smoke” possibility = more battery storage overbuild plus insurance costs = more cost.
Does the battery scenario take into account likely soaring materials costs? Whether lithium, lead or iron/steel, the materials needed for all that battery storage is certainly going to be a problem.
You will never get there because the capacity to dig up that much earn and convert it to something usable does not exist unless you divert it from everything else, like farming, home building, car manufacturing, or textiles. We will have plenty of power while we walk around naked and hungry.
The estimate of energy storage 250.000 MWh (0.25 TWh) is far too low (maybe wrong unit?), even accounting for the assumption of perfectt conversion efficiency.
Per OWiD, US Electrical demand in 2022 was 4338 TWh.
The energy storage requirement will be of the order of 10% to 15% of this, therefore 440 to 660 TWh, 100s of times greater than the author’s estimate, with costs proportionately greater
Also to be considered is the land area required for BESS which is currently in the range of 40 to 45 sqm per MWh.
Thus 1 TWh would require 1,000,000 x 40sqm = 40 sq km, and
440 TWh would require17.600 sq km or 6,800 sq miles.
660 TWh would require 26,400 sq km or 10,200 sq miles
I don’t understand these numbers at all. The US electric grid alone is rated at 1.3TW capacity. 250 MWH of energy storage would last less than 1 millisecond being drawn at that capacity.
250,000 MW is a typo! Should be 250,000,000 MWh which the math is based on.
The 250,000 time 300,000 is 75,000,000,000 or 75billion not trillion..
You sums are way off.
USA average electricity demand is 477GW. A 50 hour battery would be 23,850GWh or 23,850,000MWh. Battery cost based on $300,000/MWh is $7.2 trillion.
If USA has the land and water area to place the wind turbines and solar panels and China supplied all the stuff needed, then USA could switch to WDGs and battery with power around 50c/kWh. Roughly three times the present level. You are out by a factor of 10.
It is 250 million not thousand.
This is what is written:
That looks like 250 thousand MWh to me.
The optimum battery works out around 23.85GWh. So if you actually mean 250TWh it would be about 10 times bigger than optimum. Battery storage costs are so high that the economic solution for a NetZero grid is massive overbuild of the WDGs. Of course the economic solution is to remove all intermittent generation from the grid. If it ids not dispatchable on dec,and than it should have never been connected to the grid.
It is silly to use grossly exaggerated numbers. It makes you look foolish.
The real issue is that China is not following the lunacy so it will be the only country with the manufacturing capacity to source the NetZero stuff. Existing developed nations will increasingly rely on China for manufactured goods. The vast majority of the transition junk already needs to be sourced from China.
I discuss overbuilding in the article. The cost is still impossible.
What numbers do you think are exaggerated? The 250 million MWh is empirical, from Ken Gregory’s hour by hour analysis of two different years. $300,000 per MWh of storage capacity is way less than today’s reported cost of around $500,000. I have actually low balled it.
There is a cure for intermittency. All you have to do is accept that there will be no power guarantee.
I call it the big pharma cure.
David, I very much appreciate your rule of thumb economic estimates on how the GND is impossibly expensive.
I prefer a simpler logically impossible irrefutable route—physically/technically impossible rather than economically impossible. Cuts the response ‘but costs will come down’ out of the argument.
Take renewable intermittency as an example. There is no known electricity storage mechanism feasible at any cost given estimated reserves of the required minerals like lithium, nickel, cobalt. All the conceptual technical alternatives to LiIon have already failed technically. Two examples. Metal air batteries short from unstoppable electrode dendrite growth (put a conducting metal in air under opposing electric charges and dendrite formation is inevitable). Redox flow batteries (like minerally scarce Vanadium) have at best an electrode life of 4 years for related reasons. Metals under opposing electrical charge just do their thing.
Inherent in the periodic table of elements—divided into just three basic categories for these purposes. True conductive metals like aluminum, copper, silver, gold. Quasi metals like antimony or boron. And nonmetals like silicon or sulfur.
Great scientific discovery almost a century ago now. If you lightly dope a nonmetal like silicon with quasi metals like (commercially) antimony (n) or boron (p), voila it becomes a very useful semiconductor, in this specific example a p/n junction PV solar cell.
Natron’s sodium ion battery might be useful as a mass energy storage medium if their claims hold up. They’re claiming 50,000 cycles to 80% capacity (20% loss) with relatively rapid cycling between 0% and 100%. I’d like to see at least one large scale battery storage facility operate for a year before any though of widespread adoption.
According to the website, the batteries should be at least competitive with Li-ion in price, but the proof is on Natron to deliver.
The batteries have a lower specific energy than Li-ion, but that’s not an issue with a stationary installation.
I don’t see the Natron solution scaling up to what’s needed for 100% “renewable” electric generation.
The best storage battery is pumped storage. But you either need a geographical location capable of carrying both reservoirs or you need to move a sufficient quantity of soil to allow for reservoir stacking. Then sufficient dedicated Solar and Wind generation is required to (pump the water) recharge the upper reservoir from the lower one when the generation is available
i want a simple number Trump can use.
Thanks for explaining.
Wind, solar and battery backup is not only impossible it is mind numbingly ignorant.
Yes, a sophisticated analysis of the optimum wind and solar mix in each of the US electrical grids is required, but an all or nothing wind and solar vs natural gas and nuclear is pointless. Those 20 year W&S power purchase agreements from 2014 are going to be honored until at least 2034 and those from 2024 until 2044 (Tragically IMHO but reality).
I have been going back and forth with wind and solar aficionados on Quora at least weekly for the past couple years. They now concede that some gas turbine backup is required because of the impossible cost of storing excess summer solar for winter use. However, they insist overbuilding several fold solves most of the week to week intermittency issues when backed up by single digit percent “firming” (gap filling) and that firming and the other “imposed cost” of idled/infrequently used warm and cold standby conventional is minimal.
They claim that with an optimized mix of single shaft and combined cycle gas turbines and depending on region (California mostly solar, Midwest US mostly wind) that W&S can provide a minimum of 80% (+18% hydro) electrical generation capacity cheaper than natural gas and or nuclear. For numerous reasons too detailed and lengthily to post here my abbreviated position:
RE (Ruinous Energy) wind and solar at five (5) percent grid penetration is harmless, 10% nuisance, 15% expensive waste, 20% grid destabilizing and economically destructive, 25% insane. Once an assembly line factory begins annually supply a few dozen small scale modular reactors mineral intensive, low energy density, intermittent, too much when it’s not needed, too little when it is W&S will then be as obsolete in The West as coal and mega scale nuclear.
There are some situations where wind and solar can be economic. For example, Norway gets paid to take wind energy from Germany, which conserves their limited perched water then they charge Germany very high price for hydropower when Germany needs it. Norway the big winer because it already had a hydro grid.
Any grid with a significant level of hydro that is constrained by perched water volume can get economic benefit from wind or solar. Expanding dam capacity to meet rising average demand is usually very expensive to impossible on environmental grounds..
Solar/battery is now lower cost than diesel generation for remote sites if they are within 40S to 40N and the panels are optimised for winter collection.
The fundamental issue is that existing grids were designed to produce power from coal almost on top of the coal mines and transmit it to industrial, commercial ad residential centres. The grid benefitted hugely from economies of scale using dense energy store and load diversity.
Scale penalises wind and solar because the energy source is low density and the method of collection does not benefit from scale but the power has to be transported to where it is used.
Wind, solar with battery generally only make economic sense in off-grid applications.
The simple question in a debate like this is show me your numbers for your off0grid system. If they cannot do that then they are no more than BS artists. Until they put THEIR money where their mouth is they are worse than clueless.
My off-griid solar battery system has a solar CF of 3.9% and 50 hour battery capacity for typical demand. It took 8 years to break even being paid AUD0.66/kWh for the electricity. I doubt that a pure solar/battery grid could match that. But throw in some existing hydro and gas firming plants plus a lot of battery capacity and it could get close.
Yeah but now you’re building three or four or more generating systems all of which are used intermittently. So again the cost balloon up instead of having one or two efficient 24/7/ 365 generating Systems.
No. There are quite a few properties in Australia that do not have easy access to the grid. Their lowest cost option these days is to go solar/battery rather than diesel generator. Way less messy and lower maintenance.
The current grids exist to deliver electricity from concentrated stored energy in coal to where it is being consumed. There could be places in the developing world that can bypass the diesel stage by starting with local solar/battery and progressing to an interconnected grid based on coal or nuclear. Bangladesh is now replacing diesel power stations with coal and nuclear.
“Any grid with a significant level of hydro that is constrained by perched water volume can get economic benefit from wind or solar.”
Indeed so, though the volume is usually amply for wind intermittency; the issue is really the river flow constraint, where S&W help mightily.
But these posts really have no point. David Wojick is obviously designing a system to fail, and can pluck out numbers accordingly. The key thing is to find what someone who actually wants it to work can achieve. A big one in this arithmetic is the claim of 250 TWh needed. As I pointed out when first raised it is a nonsense figure. It assumes building just enough renewables for the average load, and letting batteries handle the huge seasonal fluctuation. You’d get the same reult if you built only enough FF generators for the average load. What they do is of course to build enough to handle the annual peak, and then some. If you do that with S&W, you need only about 10 TWh.
But of course someone who was designing a system to actually work would not rely solely on batteries. As Rick says, you can get much benefit from the huge storage in even a minor hydro component. etc
His claim is 250,000MWh, which I determine to be 250GWh. This is only 31 minutes of average demand. It needs to be closer to 50 hours at grid demand average of 477GW; translating to 23.85TWh.
I made my third step in going completely off-grid this week. I installed a Sanden heat pump HWS. It meets our needs consuming a little over 1kWh per day. I already have half my electrical load off-grid. It has now operated 12 years. I installed a wood burner for winter heating 7 years ago. Need to replace the gas cooktop with induction before getting the gas disconnected. Then a bigger battery to take the house off-the electricity grid once my 66c/kWh FIT ends.
I expect all roof owners in Australia will be looking at going off-grid leaving the grid to the poor sods who can least afford the extortion. Midday today, 41% of power being supplied by rooftops. All regions in Australia had negative wholesale price from 10am today. And it is only early spring.
USA electricity prices would end up around 50c/kWh if they go full NetZero. Present cost is around 16c/kWh so it will gradually creep up toward the 50c/kWh unless there is a dramatic tilt toward sanity or China stops supplying the suff needed for the transition.. Maybe Trump will initiate that.
“His claim is 250,000MWh, which I determine to be 250GWh.”
Yes, but as you point out, that can’t be right. He clearly means GWh, not MWh, as in this earlier post
Yes it is supposed to be 250 million MWh. Printer error?
The math is clearly based on 250 million MWh so the typo does not change the conclusion.
Rickwill. Agee wind and solar off-grid only. What I’m addressing is the need for the US to determine what the maximum wind and/or solar percentage is in each grid and what is the optimum mix. My ideal energy mix additions for 2030-2070 is zero wind and solar and a gradual phase in of SMR to be at 40% SMR, 40% CCGT,10% Hydro,10% other by 2070..
There aren’t enough minerals on the planet to build all those batteries. What cannot happen, won’t. That won’t stop the “Elite” from bankrupting us, and putting us in the dark and cold, with no food.
Elite globalist simply want to annihilate several billion of us. Shutting down low cost reliable energy generating capacity and transmission lines are the fastest way to do this along with capping agricultural output and production. Both assaults upon Energy and food production I’ve already begun in western nations.
New York Future Energy Economy Summit Pre-Meeting Update
(Roger Caiazza Blog, September 2nd, 2024)
Governor Hochul of New York will be hosting a summit concerning renewable energy on September 5th. Nuclear power will be the focus of the afternoon sessions.
– Welcome Remarks and Morning Keynote
– Accelerating Renewable Energy Deployment in New York State
– Status of Next Generation Energy Technologies
– Luncheon Keynote
– Insights from Large Consumers of Electricity
– Global Perspectives: Representatives from other states and nations who are pursuing advanced nuclear installations.
– New Nuclear Blueprint: Vet Draft Blueprint as framework for New Nuclear Master Plan
– Wrap up and Next Steps
As he notes in his article, Roger Caiazza will be attending this summit. Later in the week, we should be looking forward to his observations concerning what was said at this meeting.
Here in the southeast USA there’s a rainy season basically from December until May. It’s not uncommon for rainy, foggy, heavily overcast, conditions to prevail eight out of 10 days. Realistically, How can battery storage possibly cover more than a few hours of use before being depleted?
That level of demand would require Solar collectors to achieve a capacity many times daily consumption to replenish batteries and meet daily consumption. Same with wind. There simply isn’t enough land mass to support these capacity requirements, particularly in the winter when the sun is low and there aren’t that many hours of daylight anyway. I suppose it might be possible to build Towers of collectors, instead of spreading them across the countryside, but that would present a whole bunch of other problems in itself, such as casting shadows on other collectors. And, of course, that kind of solution would drive prices through the roof as well
Good point. Local and regional analyses like this are clearly needed. The States should be doing them since generation is their domain. But do should NERC sine reliability is their mission.
See my “Constraining renewables is a National Need”
http://www.cfact.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/WOJICKREPORT.pdf
Well the deplorables will just have to cut down on extraneous expenses and eat proper-
Meet the climate researcher who wants to take away your refrigerator (msn.com)
Live bug farms don’t require planet destroying refrigeration and climatologists report they’re delicious raw.
PS:…and cut down on the battery guzzlers-
More Efficient EVs Would Be Cheaper, Less Stressful On Power Grid (msn.com)
Letter to the Grauniad 13th August 2024 from Dustin Crummett, Executive director of the Insect Institute
“the share of farmed insects consumed by humans is negligible. Most farmed insects are instead fed to other animals”
“Instead of saving the world, insect farming mostly adds an inefficient and expensive layer to the food system we already have”
David, do please use next time lower case “k” for metric units like kWh or kW (or any other “kilo” unit for that matter). Not only this is a rule in metric system, but it will no doubt make your article look far more professional.
Yes except it is MW so I think kw is wrong. The k and the m should be the same. My decision.
Right now the first problem with wind and solar would be a winter night with no wind. That could last up to 18 hours in mid-December.
To analyze the ability of an electric utility to meet this likely compound energy drought, I must examine the engineering plans of several electric utilities for battery capacity or other backup sources of electricity.
The first problem is the lack of any engineering plans.
The second problem is that US wind droughts have lasted up to seven daya (Texas in February 2021)
Since there are no engineering plans for Nut Zero — a master plan and many other plans — Nut Zero is not a real engineering project
Nut Zero is a political strategy to implement leftist fascism, and it is working for the political leaders. Most people think Nut Zero is a real engineering project. That’s why we call them useful idiots.
I think the author might be off by the order of a thousand, that should be 250,000 GWh, or 250 TWh, estimates I’ve seen for the UK (also Germany, California) range from 25 TWH – 100 TWh.
Also, $300,000 x 250,000 = $75 billion, not trillion, so it looks like the mistake has been corrected somewhere in the workings, because the $75 trillion figure is correct.
250,000 MW is a typo. The math is based on 250,000,000. The CFACT article has been corrected.
It’s worth mentioning that batteries aren’t a new and emerging technology, they’ve been around since the 19th century, were in use throughout the 20th century, and with mobile phones and similar devices becoming popular in the early 90s, have been the subject of intensive research for the last 30+ years.
The idea that some kind of massive breakthrough that’ll reduce costs by a factor of a thousand and solve all other technical problems is for the birds.
No. The climate faithful are not avian, just birdbrains.
If it were economically viable it would already exist. All of this silliness is nothing more than a ginormous public works project undertaken by ethically bankrupt people with the goal of fleecing the US Treasury. If they were serious they would be shoring up the coast, strengthening flood defenses, managing the forests, cutting non-native grasses on Maui, etc., etc., etc.
It goes far beyond merely fleecing the US Treasury.
Two factors need to be resolved:
How much extra generation capacity is needed to recharge the back-up batteries once they have been discharged?
How are solar and wind going to power the manufacture and installation of the next generation of solar and wind?
Also there is the question as to who is benefitting from the present rush to S & W, both financially and with workers jobs.
Your assumption that a fully depleted battery can be recharged up to 100% or recharged at all should be included.
The other point that might be added to your concise list is how does battery capacity change with temperature. When it gets cold and electrical demand spikes, one finds the chemical reactions in batteries go the other direction and less energy can be provided both in amperage and voltage.
Maybe the wind and solar producers who have guaranteed prices should be made to contract for a certain amount of electricity at those prices, and be made to buy backup electricity at open market prices at night and when the wind stops blowing.
Meanwhile the gas power stations should be paid to keep their generators ticking over for when they are needed.
The present situation is like having a taxi running outside your home as a backup in case your car won’t start. With the taxi driver paying for the overheads and fuel during tick-over time.
A question for Rick Will …. If the price of grid-supplied electricity in Australia was the same as what it was thirty years ago, would large numbers of residential electricity consumers still be giving serious thought to removing themselves from the Australian grid?
Mean time to failure for a wind turbine is 4.3 years.
Mean time to failure for a LiPO battery is fire, likely to take out the whole bank, not just 1 cell.