Essay by Eric Worrall
“Much cheaper than you think”
The energy transition will be much cheaper than you think
…
Yet, this one point of agreement between climate activists and carbon addicts is, in fact, wrong. Greening the world economy will be much cheaper than the two groups imagine. … the sort of estimates that routinely form the basis for policymaking. They range from around $US3 trillion ($4.6 trillion) a year to almost $US12 trillion a year, which is indeed a lot. But these figures are overblown in four important ways.
…
The incremental bill to cut emissions is likely to be less than $US1 trillion a year, which is to say less than 1 per cent of global GDP – not peanuts, but not an unaffordable pipe dream, either. …
…The IEA’s modelling finds that reaching net zero by 2050 will require $US5 trillion a year of investment in clean energy by 2030. That is more than twice the $US2 trillion a year it reckons is currently going into clean energy and two-thirds more than its estimate of total current investment in energy. …
…
Read more: https://www.afr.com/companies/energy/the-energy-transition-will-be-much-cheaper-than-you-think-20241119-p5krqa
AFR is Australia’s premier financial newspaper.
I’m not sure which model they used to come up with these numbers, but one place such models often fall down is the fallacy of thinking renewables are a one for one swap for conventional energy. A gigawatt of installed capacity from a nuclear reactor is not equivalent to a gigawatt of installed solar or wind capacity. Nuclear power is reliable, and continues working at night.
As for the “affordable” amounts being discussed, my chosen unit of measurement for proposed climate investments these days is the cost of constructing a starship.
Back in the 1950s, Manhattan scientists embarked on a series of projects to investigate peaceful uses for nuclear explosives. Carving instant maritime harbours, greening the Sahara, and novel means of generating energy were among the ideas considered. But the most interesting idea for me is they found a viable path using 1950s technology to building a manned starship – Project Orion (search “momentum limited” in the link to see the starship).
We’re not talking Star Trek here, it would be a very slow trip – around 120 years to reach the nearest star. But that is a lot better than 10s of thousands of years, which is the best other currently available technologies can deliver.
At the time the cost was estimated at 0.1 (10%) of US GNP – $367 billion back in the day. If we stick to that percentage, in today’s dollars that would be around 0.1% x US GDP $27 trillion = $2.7 trillion to build a single manned starship. GNP is a slightly different measure of income to GDP, but I think $2.7 trillion per starship is a reasonable ballpark figure, especially if you plan to set up a production line.
For $3-12 trillion / year, you could build up to four starships per year. Within a few centuries with that kind of outlay, we could have established colonies in the Asteroid Belt and in some of the nearest star systems, and have sent human explorers (or their descendants) on grand tours of our corner of the Milky Way.
$3 – $12 trillion per year could buy us a United Federation of Planets, a foothold on becoming a Kadashev Type 3 civilisation.
The proposed energy transition climate investment, which at best would deliver energy infrastructure equivalent to what we already have, just doesn’t seem “much cheaper than you imagine” when the cost is measured in units of starships.
Correction (EW): Fixed the byline quote.
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The UK is flat broke
More quantitative easing? We have the worst Chancellor ever.
I feel for my friends in the UK.
You might find this interesting, Eric
“”Anthony Albanese shows the disaster in store for Starmer
Keir Starmer has an eerie amount in common with Australia’s stiff, humourless and deeply unpopular PM.””
https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/11/20/anthony-albanese-shows-the-disaster-in-store-for-starmer/
Indeed, they are now experiencing one of Dr. Viner’s rare events.
She seems to have been hiding these last few days, maybe she knows she’ll be gone by Christmas.
We can but hope. Ideally this whole rotten government will collapse but that’s probably wishful thinking.
Two tiers…. before your very eyes.
“”A woman who gave false information and lied about her qualifications when applying and interviewing for a job as a senior nurse at a neonatal unit has been jailed for fraud.
…
She was called “an accomplished liar”, someone who “misrepresents”, “fakes”, and “forges”. Nasir, from Hertfordshire, has now been sentenced to five years in prison.””
https://www.itv.com/news/wales/2024-10-17/neonatal-nurse-jailed-for-five-years-after-faking-qualifications
For a rather similar offence The Guardian dutifully informs us
“”Never mind what Rachel Reeves did long ago at the Bank of England: what claims do you make on your CV?””
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/21/rachel-reeves-bank-england-cv-chancellor
Why not ask BBC Verify chief, Marianna Spring? She can tell you all about lying on CVs.
Rachel from Accounts LOL
“AFR is Australia’s premier financial newspaper.”
Yes. But this is an article reprinted from The Economist.
Their main argument is that $3Bn sounds like a lot, but energy is expensive anyway, and the cost without transition would not be much less.
Out of curiosity, how much renewable energy do you think is required to replace 1GW of dispatchable energy?
NO possible amount of wind and solar could replace 1GW of COAL, GAS or NUCLEAR.
Divide by zero.
LOL 🙂
1GW average wind/solar could replace 1GW dispatchable, but you’ll need ~1,000GWh of storage at a cost of maybe $300 billion, to cope with the times the wind isn’t blowing.
You wouldn’t keep the batteries charged, assuming you had a 1GW maximum demand justifying the baseload.
And you’ll need to serially rebuild all of it on short time frames, since none of it lasts very long.
Which orifice are they going to pull all that money from, assuming they can even continue to supply sufficient raw materials on a continual basis?!
That has been NO TRANSITION.
Fossil fuels still make up around 80% of total energy supply.
UK is not transitioning (except its men), it is dying from a deeply putrid infection of wokeness, virtue-seeking and stupidity.
One symptom is the death of dispatchable electricity supply.
Yep. The IEA say the share of fossil fuels has fallen gradually from 82% in 2013 to 80% in 2023. However, over the same period they say demand has increased by 15%. So the amount of fossil fuels used has also increased.
IEA ‘World Energy Outlook 2024’ (Oct. 2024)
“” but energy is expensive anyway,””
This is, as well you know, the result of insane green energy policies. In short, it’s your fault.
…..but green energy is expensive anyway, …
Fixed it for you.
$3Bn is a bit smaller than $3Tn.
Please define ‘not much’. They actually say $5Trillion/yr, and say that this would be two-thirds more than current spend on other energy. So $2 Trillion/yr more. Is that your idea of ‘not much’ or theirs? What other things do you think $2 Trillion/yr could usefully be spent on?
“wind and solar are free” — Nick Stokes
Cognitive dissonance.
$3-12 Trillion per Year – pretty soon you’ll be talking real money.
Beat me to it
Humor – a difficult concept.
— Lt. Saavik
Only $3-12 trillion a year to fix a nonexistent problem! Such a deal!
When will the climate alarmists give up their Malthusian cult religion and allow us to get back to solving REAL problems like adequate clean water and healthy food, and interplanetary travel!?
I guess they are too fixated on clear cutting forests, and driving raptors and whales to extinction in the name of Gaia to notice any other problems! Truly the ignorant being led by the insane!!
When you really study it, all of history begins to look like a series of tremendously wasteful follies, interspersed with a few hesitant steps of progress. So they will always be with us, in one form or another.
At least we are nearing the point they will flip into a new crisis. Climate is almost spent as a political cause, the coming fake AI crisis is about to supplant the fake climate crisis.
We might still hate the music, but at least they will switch to a new song.
There’s a Thomas Sowell quote
“Much of the social history of the western world over the past 3 decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good”
I’m not sure, there’s far too much money behind the climate crisis industry for them to simply switch off when something new comes along.
Eric,
A chorus of screeching cats or a class full scratching nails across the blackboard!?
For reference, how much did it cost to create our current power systems, up to just before windmills?
Trillions of dollars in today’s terms. The difference is our current dispatchable power systems work.
One must account for the time interval. Instead of 10 years, try 100 years, for example.
The cost per year is more important that the total cost, although both are significant.
A person could afford $1000 per year for 10 years but could not afford a single $1M outlay. This is the basis for most homes being bought with a mortgage. With interest you end up outlaying roughly 3 times the initial cost of the building, but you do not have to pay it all up front.
Most people do not understand, each additional TWh of energy produced by wind, solar, costs exponentially more in capital cost than the prior TWh, and it produces more expensive electricity.
.
And while these cost increases are happening, the world is consuming more energy; like pushing a ball getting heavier, up a slope getting steeper.
.
At some point, people will say, with riots to support it: SCREW IT
Germany, the UK, etc., have reached that point
Others are getting there
.
Just look at the statistics over the past 30 years of Germany and the UK
.
The economic/financial wall is hit at about 35% wind/solar, depending on the physical conditions of the country; some countries are more lucky than others.
Look at the bright side – amusing terms like ‘Dunkelflaute’ wouldn’t exist without the needless push to renewables.
Ballpark is $500m per GW for a modern CCGT plant, so for the UK’s 40GW demand you’re looking at $20 billion, so over a 30-year life, perhaps $1 billion a year.
How much of that is upfront costs and how much is amortized over the 30 years.
In accounting terms, that’s the same thing.
“$3 – $12 trillion per year could buy us a United Federation of Planets, a foothold on becoming a Kadashev Type 3 civilisation.”
Given that we regularly run up annual deficits well north of a trillion dollars (usdebtclock.org shows us at $2.2 trillion right now), and we rack up well above ten trillion in deficits every decade, I doubt that even $20 trillion would get us a single base on Mars. The only reason that we might even do that would be with the help of Elon Musk…
How did we get from “too cheap to meter”, nuclear energy strategy. To “too expensive to use” ruinables strategy?
Science stopped being a mandatory course in secondary colleges.
Or high school or middle school or elementary school.
Whaaaat!? They still teach gender studies, don’t they!?
Humor – a difficult concept.
— Lt. Saavik
We need more STEM TEACHERS from Kindergarten to Graduate School.
The US ranks 24th in scholastic achievement.
We have a US Education Department with a budget of $238 billion in 2024
Clearly, it should be declared dysfunctional, based on the evidence.
We need much less people who walk across borders with ZERO skill sets; but they can be registered to vote.
In many cases, their skill set is robbing, violence, raping, murdering, creating wanton chaos, because they came from gangster, third-world neighborhoods, where those skills sets are required.
The leftist, woke cabal behind puppet-in-the-basement Biden should be tried for high crimes and misdemeanors.
The US education system will never improve until they have to compete for their money with other schools! The teacher’s unions showed their complete disdain for their pupils during the ChiCom19 plandemic! With vouchers many, if not most, parents would take their kids somewhere that cares and educates; and leave the punishing propaganda mills behind!
REAL science did.
Too many courses PRETENDING to be science replaced real science courses.
The non-science “science” courses generally include the word “science” in them, to convince the gullible that they are taking real science courses.
ACTUAL Science courses:
PRETEND Science Courses:
It’s not a hard and fast rule, but is often a “tell” – almost like they’re trying to convince you.
People like Maurice Strong, Stephen Schneider, Michael Mann ad nauseam.
The big push of women into STEM.
Hey now. I like women. Some of my favorites are engineers and scientists.
I have no problem if someone has the skills, education, experience, etc., and can effectively communicate being part of a STEM team.
That said, the big push I am against. Encouragement, certainly, but no pushing!
Missing, so far, from this discussion is the concept of wealth. Wealth is only created when the value of labor and material exceeds the cost. Wealth is consumed when spent for such ‘foolish’ things like food, shelter, and family, as well as non-productive wind turbines and solar panels. When society forfeits its wealth on non-productive solar panels, wind turbines, and starships, there’s ultimately not enough left over for food and shelter for everyone. So far, most of earth’s societies have managed to keep ahead of the curve, though some of them barely. The green energy agenda is challenging that position for all of us.
It is deliberate, a part of the plan to achieve a massive population reduction and One World Order.
To generalize, the ‘green energy agenda’ is but one aspect of the wealth destruction that occurs when governments, usually via a captive central banking system, create money ex nihilo. Other examples today include the entirety of the Left’s agenda, as well as the continuation of the warfare state. Note that none of these ‘malinvestments’ would be politically feasible if they were required to be paid for out of current tax revenues, or if they required any deferral of current consumption, i.e., real savings. Instead, we have price inflation, debt and, of course, less wealth as real savings are inevitably siphoned off to support the malinvestments at the same time productive capacity declines.
The CO2 issue is nothing compared to the problem of giant space rocks wiping out all life as we know it. But for the low low price of 10 trillion dollars a year, I’ll gladly sort it out for you. Bargain!
What do you do when you don’t have an extra 3 to 12 Trillion Dollars just waiting around for some project to absorb them?
Borrow it and put the pay back burden on people not yet born.
Most people do not understand, each additional TWh of energy produced by wind, solar, costs exponentially more in capital cost than the prior TWh, and it produces more expensive electricity.
And while these cost increases are happening, the world is consuming more energy; like pushing a ball getting heavier, up a slope getting steeper.
At some point, people will say, with riots to support it: SCREW IT
Germany, the UK, etc., have reached that point
Others are getting there
Just look at the statistics over the past 30 years of Germany and the UK
The economic/financial wall is hit at about 35% wind/solar, depending on the physical conditions of the country; some countries are more lucky than others.
George Dyson, son of Freeman Dyson, wrote up the story of Orion in ‘Project Orion The Atomic Spaceship 1957 – 1965’ published in both the US and UK in 2002.
As our Minister of Energy and Climate Change (yes it’s a real title), Chris Bowen says, “The Sun doesn’t send a bill.”
A really embarrassing, sophomoric mistake in the early concepts for Project Orion was the eventual realization that detonating fission bombs in space produced relatively little momentum from the bomb blast onto the Orion mothership “blast absorber plate/pusher plate”, since relatively little mass was vaporized from the bomb and therefore most of the blast energy appeared in the form of radiation, not hot expanding gases. Too many “scientists” at the time overlooked the fact that atomic weapons detonated on Earth’s surface convey blast energy/momentum via interaction (rapid heating) of the surrounding dense atmospheric gases.
This oversight was corrected in subsequent refinements of Project Orion to make the mothership’s blast plate ablative so that the nuclear EM and particle radiation could vaporize and remove reaction mass from the plate . . . but then it was realized just how inefficient this process would be in the vacuum of space (nothing like combustion of reaction products in a closed chamber at high pressure, with subsequent unilaterally-directed mass ejection out of a rocket’s de Laval nozzle).
Later attempts to salvage the overall concept included designs for rapidly injecting large quantities of “propellant mass” (often stated to be just water) between the ejected fission bomb and the Orion “pusher plate” but engineering calculations and models showed just how infeasible this would be for interstellar travel.
Unfortunately, not so with the fission-bomb-based Orion concept . . . but “we” (the US government) certainly could have wasted the money pursuing it.
Momentum = mass x velocity. The bomb debris (including tungsten charge shaper + polystyrene) hit the pusher plate at 30km / s so you don’t need a lot of mass to deliver a huge thump. In the starship most of the mass is bombs, so what you are talking about is a ship filled with propellant which delivers up to 75000 Isp as opposed to 450 Isp which is the best a chemical rocket can deliver.
The specific impulse of a rocket is nothing more than the exhaust velocity (say, in m/s) divided by the gravitational constant, g=9.8 m/s^2 in this case, for units conversion.
Thus, an Isp of 450 seconds is equivalent to an exhaust velocity of 450*9.8 = 4,400 m/sec = 4.4 km/sec.
In a relative frame, an impact velocity of 30 km/sec is equivalent to about 30,000/9.8 = 3,060 seconds of Isp . . . I have no idea how you arrived at it being equivalent to “up to 75,000 (seconds) Isp” delivered by Orion-style nuclear blasts . . . that is RIDICULOUS, being equivalent to a velocity of 0.2% the speed of light!
Heck, even the best ion rockets today don’t have Isp’s approaching 75,000 seconds . . . from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_impulse :
— NSTAR electrostatic xenon ion thruster has Isp of 1,950–3,100 seconds,
— NEXT electrostatic xenon ion thruster has Isp of 1,320–4,170 seconds,
— DS4G electrostatic ion thruster has Isp of 21,400 seconds.
Of course, it’s one thing to assert a “tungsten charge shaper + polystyrene” mass could survive an atomic blast happening, say 0.5 to two meters away for long enough to be accelerated to 30 km/sec velocity, and its another thing to have demonstrated such a thing can actually happen in the real world.
wilpost said: “Most people do not understand, each additional TWh of energy produced by wind, solar, costs exponentially more in capital cost than the prior TWh, and it produces more expensive electricity.”
Here in the US Northwest, the regional power planning council’s 2021 long range plan calls for the addition of 3,000 MW of intermittent wind and solar capacity plus 720 MW of firming capacity. Comparatively little backup storage is projected to be needed.
The council’s 2021 plan does not come close to accounting for currently expected increases in the US Northwest’s regional power demand.
In order to account for those expected increases, suppose we simply assume that the 3,000 MW expansion of wind & solar intermittent generation must now become 3,000 MW of wind & solar baseload generation operating 24/7/365.
SYSTEM SPECIFICATION:
— The hypothetical wind & solar expansion matches the 24/7/365 performance of four new-build 1,100 MW nuclear reactors.
— The expanded wind & solar capacity produces 72,000 megawatt-hours daily; 3,000 megawatts instantaneous demand; for a total of 26,280,000 megawatt-hours per year.
— The integrated wind-solar-battery system includes 9,000 MW of nameplate wind;9,000 MW of nameplate solar; and 3,600,000 MW-hours of battery storage.
— A 6X combined wind & solar overbuild yields 18,000 MW total nameplate capacity. Assume a combined 25% annual capacity factor based on the BPA’s experience within its area of load balancing authority.
— Battery storage capacity is driven by seasonal requirements. A substantial drawndown occurs in late fall and winter, a substantial recovery occurs in early spring.
— Battery operating range: 0-100% full; 0-3.6 TWh stored; 0-50 days reserve at 72,000 MWh per day.
— Winter storage is exhausted once every decade for periods of up to 7 days. Output then falls to 6,000 MWh per day.
— Battery charge and discharge conversion losses are 8% on battery charge and 12% on battery discharge.
— The hypothetical system supplies all ancillary grid support services; e.g. frequency & voltage stabilization, reactive power, inertia, etc.
This first graphic illustrates the wind & solar capacity factors experienced by the Bonneville Power Administration within its area of load balancing authority between 06/21/2022 and 06/21/2024. Note the powerful influence of seasonal variation in capacity factors as opposed to daily variation.
A second graphic illustrates the performance of the above-specified hypothetical wind & solar expansion, an expansion which matches the 24/7/365 performance of four new-build 1,100 MW nuclear reactors over a similar 24-month period; i.e., 06/21 of Year 1 through 06/21 of Year 3.
Note that the second graphic illustrates which portion of the daily generation goes directly to baseload, which portion goes into battery storage, which portion is either exported or else curtailed, and which portion is drawn from battery storage in order to reliably produce 72,000 megawatt-hours per day.
COSTS:
Restating the basic assumption, the 3,000 MW expansion of wind & solar intermittent generation as described in the US Northwest’s 2021 power plan must now become 3,000 MW of wind & solar baseload generation operating 24/7/365.
In other words, the expansion equals the expected performance of four new-build 1,100 MW AP1000 nuclear reactors like those constructed at Vogtle 3 & 4 in Georgia.
I haven’t yet gotten into doing a detailed analysis of the costs of the hypothetical 3,000 MW 24/7/365 wind and solar expansion. That’s the next item on my casual wintertime task agenda.
However, under very highly optimistic assumptions for what wind systems, solar systems, and especially battery systems will cost within the next ten years, a rough guess would place just the initial capital cost of this expansion at upwards of 600 billion dollars, probably more. Roughly ten times the initial capital cost of four new-build 1,100 MW reactors at 15 billion dollars per reactor.
See my additional remarks in a second comment post attached to this one directly below. These remarks add further informational detail concerning the second graphic.
BETA BLOCKER’S ADDITIONAL REMARKS on the HYPOTHETICAL 3,000 MW 24/7/365 WIND & SOLAR EXPANSION:
Restating the basic assumption in the comment directly above, the 3,000 MW expansion of wind & solar intermittent generation as described in the US Northwest’s 2021 power plan must now become 3,000 MW of wind & solar baseload generation operating 24/7/365.
In other words, equivalent to the expected performance of four new-build 1,100 MW AP1000 nuclear reactors like those constructed at Vogtle 3 & 4 in Georgia.
Referring to my comment in the post directly above:
1: The current plan for the US Northwest is to cover Montana and Wyoming with wind turbines and solar panels and to construct new transmission capacity through Idaho to serve the states of Washington and Oregon where most of the new capacity will be consumed.
2: The incoming Trump Administration will not be friendly to covering Montana and Wyoming with wind turbine farms and solar farms. (Nor will many Montanans and Wyomians.) It is likely the climate activist state governments of Oregon and Washington will be faced with siting their proposed new-build wind & solar infrastructure entirely within their own state borders.
3: Overall capacity factor for the combined wind & solar system is 25% on an annual basis. The second graphic illustrates the pattern of generation for a combined wind & solar system for a hypothetical 24-month period. Even for a period as short as 24 months, this graphic displays highly seasonal variation in combined wind & solar output.
4: A 6X wind & solar overbuild factor — 18,000 MW total plus 3.6 TWh battery storage to produce 3,000 MW reliably 24/6/365 — is used to reduce energy storage requirements for fall and winter battery drawdown periods. For example, a 4X overbuild as opposed to a 6X overbuild would require from 12 to 15 terawatt-hours of battery storage as opposed to the 3.6 terawatt-hours specified.
5: An even balance of wind & solar capacity is specified. Several factors are at play here, including the availability of infrastructure siting locations suitable for each specific type, plus the political need to support wind energy suppliers and solar energy suppliers equally well in terms of contracts and dollars spent.
6: The graphic above illustrates two periods of battery drawdown & recovery. The volume of megawatt-hours drawn in the second drawdown period is substantially larger than that drawn in the first. An extended lull in wintertime wind and solar output, as would be expected to occur roughly every decade, would completely exhaust the entire 3.6 TWh of storage for periods lasting seven days or longer.
7: The battery storage system operates between zero and 100% full. The volume of storage is so large, as demanded by seasonal drawdown & recovery requirements, that daily and weekly charge/discharge cycles can be spread among large numbers of battery packs, thus extending their useful life without needing to impose a hard 20%-to-80% capacity range restriction on each individual 4-hour or 10-hour battery pack.
8: The wind & solar system supplies every grid stabilization service that the legacy system currently supplies. e.g. frequency & voltage stabilization, reactive power, inertia, etc. Where direct inversion technology isn’t up to the task of supplying the necessary grid stabilization services, large DC-powered electro-motor units turn large rotating AC generation units thus covering any inertia and reactive power requirements which can’t be handled through direct inversion.
9: The use of motor-driven DC to AC conversion, where necessary, is an exceptionally inefficient and expensive approach to supplying grid stabilization services. That said, the cost of 3.6 TWh of battery storage is so large that in the grand scheme of things, the costs and inefficiencies of motor-driven DC to AC conversion are a comparatively minor component of the total system cost.
And, as I said above, I haven’t yet gotten into doing a detailed analysis of the costs of this hypothetical 3,000 MW 24/7/365 wind and solar expansion. That’s the next item on my casual wintertime task agenda.
Some comments
Tesla recommends not discharge below 20% and not charge above 80%, to achieve 15 year life with normal aging.
Almost all battery systems operate at less than 10% throughput
Battery systems used to shave midday solar peaks will deliver 80% of the electricity taken from the high voltage grid, to the HV grid, in late afternoon/early evening, the peak hours.
Such battery systems could reach up to 40% throughput
At 40% throughput, the cost of the throughput will be about 35 c/kWh for very large battery systems, on top of the cost of the electricity taken from the HV grid, based on 2024 pricing
Battery systems for long term storage, say a month, have not been built yet
Wilpost, you raise issues which are central to establishing what the real-world configuration for the 3,600,000 megawatt-hours of battery storage specified in the 3,000 megawatt wind & solar expansion might actually look like — the numbers and types of physical storage units needed and their individual rated capacities.
The part of the graph labeled ‘Battery’ illustrates how much dispatachable energy is in storage at the end of any given day within the two-year period covered by the graph.
This ‘battery’ is a theoretical energy storage system with a nominal capacity of 3,600,000 megawatt-hours. (With emphasis here on ‘nominal’.)
The graphic is geared towards illustrating seasonal requirements as opposed to illustrating throughput activity which occurs every hour inside of a 24-hour tracking window.
A thorough technical study performed by qualified battery technologists would be needed to establish the actual numbers and capacities of the energy storage battery packs needed to service the storage patterns shown in the graphic.
The theoretical capacity figure is 3.6 terawatt-hours. But the actual capacity needed would be larger than 3.6 TWh. Possibly much larger depending on what the technical study determined.
Wilpost said:
— Tesla recommends not discharge below 20% and not charge above 80%, to achieve 15 year life with normal aging.
— Almost all battery systems operate at less than 10% throughput.
— Battery systems used to shave midday solar peaks will deliver 80% of the electricity taken from the high voltage grid, to the HV grid, in late afternoon/early evening, the peak hours. Such battery systems could reach up to 40% throughput
— 40% throughput, the cost of the throughput will be about 35 c/kWh for very large battery systems, on top of the cost of the electricity taken from the HV grid, based on 2024 pricing.
Note from the graphic that it contains two general classes of battery storage activity: One class in which the theoretical battery is 100% full during late spring and summer; and a second where the ‘battery’ is being systematically drawn down in fall and winter in order to maintain 72,000 MWh output per day.
While this hypothetical battery is 100% full during the late spring and summer, daily/weekly activity can be distributed among the many thousands of battery packs which make up the ‘cells’ of the battery.
The problem of managing the distribution of charge/recharge activity becomes more complicated when the battery is being drawn down in late fall and winter and then is being seasonally recharged to full capacity in early spring. Daily/weekly operational requirements must be managed within the context of a larger seasonal drawdown and its following seasonal recovery.
How much more complicated does the problem become?
I’m suspecting that it becomes significantly more complicated. A thorough study by qualified experts is needed to address this topic. To my knowledge, no such study has been done for long-term energy storage using current or proposed battery technologies, as opposed to using hydro-based energy storage solutions such as Snowy 2.
Wilpost: “Battery systems for long term storage, say a month, have not been built yet.”
Wind and solar advocates are telling us that energy storage is the key to solving the problem of wind and solar intermittency. The often-heard refrain is “The cost of battery storage is coming down rapidly.” (Yeah. Right.)
Here in the US Northwest, hydro-based long-term energy storage is maxed out. In a context where the US Northwest cannot rely upon outside sources of electricity to cover regional shortfalls in RE generation occurring on a seasonal basis, the only zero-carbon solution which isn’t nuclear involves massive volumes of battery storage and very large RE capacity overbuilds.
No one among the wind and solar advocates here in the US Northwest has a clue about what it will take to make their vision for the future happen.
It’s either that, or else these people do actually have a clue and are simply lying through their teeth in promoting the needs of their zero carbon agenda.
I wondered about that. That area seems one of the most suitable for hydro and pumped storage.
Is there much scope for adding the lower storage for pumped hydro to allow increased hydro output?
That assumes the limiting factor is inflow rather than the downstream flow.
No more dams or large reservoirs will be built in the region. There is too much opposition from a variety of political, business, tribal, and other stakeholder groups. The opposition to new dams and new large resevoirs also crosses political boundaries.
The existing dams and impoundments on the Snake, the Columbia, and other regional rivers are mostly run-of-river dams and have very limited space for additional storage volume which could be used for pumped storage purposes.
Adding pumped storage and more hydropower in the US Northwest is not in the cards. Too many competing demands for the water resources in the region make it a non-starter.
Thanks,
Ignoring all other aspects, is it possible to
a) add more run of river dams
b) add downstream storages for pumped hydro?
It’s not even worth looking into the other aspects if the capacity is already maxed out.
The other aspects certainly aren’t an insignificant obstacle. They have delayed or stopped most dam construction in Australia for decades – even flood mitigation and water supply dams.
Few locations remain in the US Northwest which are suitable for large volume dam construction. The best ones have all been taken by legacy dams built from the 1930’s through the early 1970’s.
Here in Washington State, to my knowledge, only one location remains which is topographically optimum for a creating a large volume water storage reservoir.
Advocates of creating that reservoir gave up on the idea more than two decades ago after opposition surfaced from a broad coalition of stakeholder groups.
First, there is not, and will never be, any ” transition.” No matter how much worse-than-useless wind and solar they build.
Second, there is nothing “cheap” about essentially flushing trillions down the toilet.