According to a recent article published in The Conversation, installing millions of storage batteries distributed through the grid — in homes, businesses, and local communities – coupled with wind and solar generation, can avoid investments in new transmission infrastructure. But unless installing those batteries is accompanied by physically disconnecting from the grid, or consumers are willing to forgo reliable electricity, this claim is yet another example of electricity “magical thinking.”
Electricity customers, both residential and industrial, need to be aware of this home-based battery storage fantasy.
First, batteries store electricity; they don’t generate it. But the move towards electrifying the U.S. motor vehicle fleet, along with electrifying space and water heating, will double electricity consumption. Although some of the additional electricity needed may come from distributed sources such as rooftop solar, green energy advocates claim that most of the needed electricity will be generated at large-scale wind and solar facilities located far from cities and towns.
The article also claims, “[w]e could get by with fewer transmission lines if we store more solar and wind power for later.” But delivering the additional electricity needed will require building new transmission lines, regardless of how much battery storage is installed in homes and in local communities. Moreover, local distribution systems—the poles and wires running down streets—will also have to be upgraded to handle the additional loads.
Second, the costs of building sufficient battery capacity (to say nothing of the costs of additional wind and solar generation) to ensure homes and local communities do not suffer from extended blackouts will be prohibitive.
The numbers tell the story.
In the U.S., a typical residential household consumes around 10,800 kWh annually, or about 30 kWh per day. Of course, the amount varies depending on the size of home, the region of the country, and the season of the year. With electrified space and water heat, some regions of the country where electricity demand now peaks in summer will see demand peak in winter, while existing winter-peaking regions will see winter demand spike even further.
According to a U.S. Department of Energy model, a heat pump in a typical home will consume about 5,500 kWh annually. That alone represents a 50% increase in electricity use. Charging a typical EV adds another 4,300 kWh annually. In total, those will add almost 10,000 kWh of consumption annually, roughly doubling current consumption to about 60 kWh per day, although the increase will be greatest in winter when heating loads peak.
Supplying the additional electricity while ensuring the same level of service reliability (i.e., no extended outages or limiting consumers’ access to electricity because of insufficient supplies) will require enough battery storage to provide electricity at night and over multi-day periods when there is little wind and sun available to recharge those batteries. Although the article recommends using consumers’ EVs to supply electricity, few consumers will likely wish to wake up to an uncharged EV and an inability to travel, especially if there is no stored electricity available to recharge their EVs.
Using the U.S. consumption averages, if existing local distribution systems can serve today’s average load of 30 kWh/day, then enough battery storage must be built to supply the remaining 30 kWh. and, more importantly, the peak power demand of electric heat pumps and EV chargers. A typical Level 2 home EV charger, for example, can draw 20 kilowatts (kW). A heat pump can draw 7 kW.
The largest Tesla Powerwall, which is designed for home use, provides a maximum of 11.5 kW of power and 13.5 kWh of storage under ideal conditions. (When temperatures fall, so does battery capacity and efficiency.) Hence, at least three Powerwall units would be required to provide a typical home with sufficient electricity to supplement existing grid capacity. For one million homes, that means three million Powerwall units providing a maximum of 40.5 million kWh (40,500 megawatt-hours) of battery storage.
At a cost of around $12,000 installed, that translates into a cost of $36,000 per home. The U.S. has over 80 million single-family homes and over 130 million dwelling units. Hence, 240 million Powerwall units would be required just for single-family homes, costing almost $3 trillion. By comparison, Tesla’s current manufacturing capacity is 700,000 units per year. Thus, outfitting all single-family homes with them would require almost 350 years of Powerwall production. The minerals requirements would also be staggering and would require mining billions of tons of ore for the necessary lithium, copper, cobalt, and other metals.
In theory, an electric system could be designed to provide reliable service using wind, solar, and battery storage. However, in reality, huge investments would still be required in new transmission and distribution lines, regardless of how many storage batteries are installed. It would also be ruinously expensive.
Ignoring physical and economic realities may be fashionable, but reality always wins in the long run. The electric grid and its components form a complex system which most of us take for granted, which enable misleading claims regarding the simplicity of electrifying everything and powering it all almost exclusively with wind, solar, and batteries. Electric utilities and planners can provide a public service by explaining why this scenario, given today’s technology, isn’t possible.
Jonathan Lesser is a senior fellow with the National Center for Energy Analytics, a senior fellow with the Discovery Institute, and the president of Continental Economics.
This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.
Many years ago, maybe 2000 or so I toured a house in Door County, WI built by a guy whose card said Professional Engineer. He wanted to see if he could build a functional house that was off the grid. He did exactly that. Complete with an organic toilet that looked like you would be pooping in a bowl of corn flakes. That aside, everything in the house that could function on natural or propane gas was: Gas Drier, Gas Stove, Gas Water heater. Heating was a wood burner. The house was open with very few walls to impede heat from the wood burner.
On the tour he told us that his electricity, scarce as it was, wasn’t cheap.
He had solar panels on top of a small building about the size of a two car garage with
converters and golf cart lead acid batteries inside to run the florescent lights and anything else that didn’t take much “juice”
He had an expensive auxiliary generator for when the sun didn’t shine. He said he never had to use it.
So it can be done, but not if the local government bans natural gas and propane.
An Australian recently commented that he is running off grid (plenty of places in Australia without grid access), with a system install cost of A$80,000 (US$52,000), with an annual diesel backup genset cost of A$1800 (US$1200).
Did you ask the question of how much money was spent building this off grid wonder?
Some acolyte will be along soon here to tell us how fantastical their rooftop solar + battery is, how much they’re saving on utility bills, and how we should all be doing this.
Grid viability concerns?
“Grids? We doan need no stinkin’ grids”
“Grids? We doan need no stinkin’ grids”
Grids? Where we’re going, we don’t need grids.
Maybe I’m that “acolyte”. So this part… But unless installing those batteries is accompanied by physically disconnecting from the grid, or consumers are willing to forgo reliable electricity, this claim is yet another example of electricity “magical thinking.”
I’d like to say that “disconnecting from the grid” is not always allowed. I’m in Florida and it is against the law for any electrician or solar company or otherwise to disconnect me from the grid.
Now for the “acolyte” part, I installed 20 solar rooftop panels and solar hot water and a solar assisted heat pump in 8/2014 and the panels went live 1/2015. Now from an ROI standpoint I had calculated around an 8 year payback. That was based on the system output and reduction of kW use from the power company. Many things have gone into changing all of that.
First – not factored into any ROI calculations are panel replacement and/or inverter replacements. Also not factored in is what the power company can get changed when they go to the PUC requesting rate hikes. D/T so many people availing themselves of solar in FL the power companies have requested and gotten approved the ability to charge a “hooked to the grid” fee (my term, not theirs). So my system has advanced from the 20 rooftop panels and the hot water and solar AC to 30 panels, 3 Tesla power walls and a new (because the hot water tank sprung a leak) hybrid hot water heater and just added a new compressor and air handler (these latter only new because the old compressor was in need of major repairs and the air handler was very old).
So this system has given me $0 in electricity costs since installation. I do have to pay the monthly “staying hooked to the grid” fee which is slightly over $30 a month.
Do I recommend this for everyone… NO. Are there things to consider when doing something like this that many don’t think about… YES. Like panels or inverters that go bad. New roof installation before putting something like this on your roof. Do you have a reasonably good amount of sunshine? This system covered our entire electricity needs when hurricane Hellene knocked out our power for 16 hours during and after that hurricane. Even though we got hit harder by Milton we never lost power. The system will always keep us in power as long as the sun comes back out.
My wife has medical equipment that will always need power and this system is great for continuous power. An ROI is not even feasible to calculate now – of the original 20 rooftop panels 3 have been replaced and all the inverters for all 20. If I had to calculate an ROI now it would be in the 20-30+ year timeframe because this system was not cheap. I don’t and didn’t do it for how much a VERY costly system would save me monthly on my utility bill, I did it so I wouldn’t lose power in the event of a power outage in our area.
The entire system powers our house 24/7 because the batteries power us when the sun goes down. Only if we had a hurricane that wiped out power to our development followed by a week or more without sun would our batteries not be able to handle our needs. And as AndyHce noted below, this is “hardly a recipe for the majority” and I wouldn’t recommend it as such. I know someone who has a Generac propane system to power their house in the event they lose power during a snow/ice storm (they live up north) and they didn’t install that for its ROI, just their piece of mind.
But Florida have not gone crazy on “renewables” like other jurisdictions. What is your unit cost of electricity? South Australians are averaging around AUD0.6/kWh when the service is taken into account.
What can the supplier do if you refuse to pay the $30/month? Disconnect you? Or off to court?
In Australia, the retailers are left with the cost of the meter if you isolators from the grid. At least until they pay the poles and wires business to remove the meter.
Sadly, it’s just beginning in Florida.
Florida Power & Light is owned by holding company Nextera, who have plans to spend $420billion over the next 20 years on CapEx, largely subsidy harvesting for “renewables”. That includes a 1200 square mile solar facility in Florida. As I learned recently, which should not have been a surprise, is that Florida has only about 4.5 hours / day of usable solar output. They have regular, consistent cloudy periods, never mind hurricanes.
Dave Walsh (@davewalshenergy on the usual social media sites) has much more detail on major US utilities with similar plans. The end result will be as documented on WUWT and elsewhere – great returns for investors largely driven by subsidy harvesting, higher prices for consumers, and less reliable electricity for consumers.
Out here in Western WA state, we were just without power for 3 days. some neighborhoods are still without power. Gas powered portable generators (gasoline and nat gas) saved us from losing food and freezing. Fortunately we have gas heat backup, forced hot air. And the WA electorate just failed two of three intelligence tests in the recent election, including starting to ban natgas along with small gas engines. The only humorous part was watching the Teslas trolling for power, like cockroaches scrambling around.
My current utility, Puget Sound Energy, used to have a diverse mix of coal, natgas, and hydro power sources. In the race to “decarbonize”, we’re now totally reliant on power imported from Bonneville Power Authority (BPA) which is a federally run organization that is sending more and more power to California. And of course, the greenies want to continue busting hydropower dams, for the salmon
Reading accounts of how to replace a simple grid connexion with solar, reminds me of the observation: a camel is a horse designed by a committee.
Seems like a whole house generator would be fine for you with less cost and high reliability since it can run in cloudy weather and at night. Did you look at the economics of this as well as solar+batteries?
I looked into a Generac whole house generator, the lot is less than 1/4 acre and there isn’t much room outside to put it – that I felt was innocuous and safe. I thought about what it might take to make an inground buried propane tank and the volume I might need. The issue of finding a place to put the tank holding the fuel. Did you know you need to run them periodically to make sure they are functioning properly? Assuming the fuel used doesn’t have a “life expectancy” or use by date so to speak, continuous use is going to require refills and you are subject to prices for the gas (LNG or propane or whatever you use) and then you can also be subject to the whims of the people in power who could once again promote CO2 restrictions or other regulations that could make the investment almost worthless. AND, the cost was not that much less than the cost of the batteries excluding the solar panels. But when you add in the tax credits (30%) that I had it almost became even. And I don’t have to worry about checking fuel levels in tanks and calling for refills.
I have a generac whole house generator with a 500-gallon propane tank. That can run a week or more (depends on load, yes). It has a timer that runs it for 10 minutes every week. Last time I topped it up was something like 4 years ago. It’s still reading practically full, and that’s included a couple short-term power outages.
I’m chuckling because a stately house near me had a metal roof installed one week, unusual material in my area in a city.
Made more sense the following month when solar panels were installed.
(It’s a ‘heritage’ house, probably over a century old, has veranda typical of the era, looks in good condition.)
My Wisconsin farm home has the potential to be off grid for weeks at a time. We put in a hand pump well off the kitchen and screened in porch, We have an auxilliary wood heat firebox plumbed into the propane furnace plenum if propane runs low. Plus 8 face rods of dried split hardwood next to it. We have a wood burning stove in the family room. We have an auxiliary generator, plus 80 gallons of gas stored in the tractor shed across the road. For fridge, freezer, firebox blower, and lighting.
Nothing to do with wind and solar.
Good for you but hardly a recipe for the majority. I don’t know the statistics but I would guess that if not a majority then still a very sizeable percentage of the population has no possibility of meeting the physical requirements to build such facilities. Not that most could afford the hardware and fuel anyway.
True. It really helps that it is a largish dairy farm with three substantial woodlots. We only harvest standing deadfalls, snake them out with logging chains using the compact 4wd tractor, then cut and split in the fall over by the old corn crib. Load the F250, back it up to the basement window, take the window out, load into the cellar next to the firebox. Stack. Easy peasy. And beats a gym ownership.
Old firewood saying: it warms you twice.
I worked out that I was handling my pieces of firewood 6 times before it was burning in the fireplace –
7 take out ashes and scatter them …
😉
It sounds like you have a quite acceptable system there!
I spent my childhood years (1950’s-1960’s) in Wisconsin and the memories of the winters are not pleasant. The house was a two story farmhouse with zero insulation anywhere. The kitchen was the original part of the house built sometime in the mid 1800’s as a log cabin. That was evident by the log beams in the root cellar underneath and having to use a chain saw to make a window opening in a kitchen wall.
Heat for the house was a small cast iron wood burning stove in the kitchen (also used to cook meals on) and an oil burning space heater in the living room. Bedrooms were on the second floor reached by a narrow staircase. I remember all too many times having to break the layer of ice on my glass of water next to the bed in the mornings.
Water to the house came from a well & pump located in a small milkhouse 100 feet from the house and piped underground. Numerous times the water in the pipe would freeze and we wouldn’t have water for days.
The Green Blob spreads the fantasy that wind, solar, and batteries are also subject to Moore’s Law. While there was considerable room for growth in the performance of microchips in the 1960’s, current windmills, solar panels, and chemical batteries are already at some large percentage of theoretically maximum performance.
So, barring some science fiction level discovery, “renewables” will continue to be unreliable and unaffordable.
Good point about the fiction that Moore’s Law applies to the “renewables” hardware.
Moore’s Law worked because it was foreseeable that semiconducting transistors could shrink in size without losing performance.
It is NOT foreseeable that solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries could shrink in size without losing performance.
Greenies are more than a little bit short in the logic department. To them, even simple arithmetic (let alone math) is hard.
But they are “technology” or “science”, and everyone knows wishing hard enough for some outcome will make it succeed. How hard? Why, hard enough for it to happen!
Magical thinking is encouraged in certain circles.
I haven’t seen the Green Blob quote but surely its analogous to the cost reductions rather than actually referring to shrinking in size.
Here is Moore’s paper from 1965 and there is a strong component of cost.
Already known about but ignored, look up Betz Law which determines the max power from a wind turbine. They know about it and are already at the limits so are left with raising the height of the turbine and/or finding windy areas. Hence the huge off shore turbine’s, trouble is salt water is high corrosive and the taller the turbine the more expensive to maintain.
Broken Hill thought it could get by with fewer transmission lines.
It’s more likely that the NSW and SA state governments thought Broken Hill could get by with fewer transmission lines.
I believe that the line towers were old and were purchased from the private company by Transgrid, who then proceeded to overload the towers with new additional lines. The result was inevitable when the next storm arrived.
Home-based battery backup is a good choice for areas which suffer occasional short power outages lasting hours but not days.
In the 3rd world, I lived in a home with battery back-up — totally necessary as the power would go out for hours almost every day. Automotive batteries (six or eight in a bank) tied to the house electrical system through a charger/inverter would automatically kick in after a minute or two and supply household alternating current.
Until the batteries ran out or juice, of course. But, for most of the short outages, this kept the frig and freezer operating, the pool pump and filter running, a few lights on, and the internet up and operating.
When the batteries ran down, another automatic switch started the diesel powered generator — which gobbled diesel but provided dependable long-term electrical power until the grid was back up (sometimes days…).
These systems will not provide grid scale electricity storage regardless of the number of homes that have them. And, back-feeding the grid from EVs is and has always been a pipe dream.
I will also add that some sort of battery storage is mandatory for a solar installation to avoid the “solar duck” problem. The battery needs to be sized to handle electric usage between 4PM to 10PM. This will not provide for “100% renewable” electricity, but it will make life a lot easier for the grid.
Requiring any utility scale solar of wind installation to have about an hour or so of energy storage to flatten out the variations in generation would also be an enormous help to the grid.
I have solar panels and a petrol generator, and am getting a battery installed, because the grid supply is getting unreliable with huge price spikes. Really huge. Hopefully these devices will get me through the worst if it until we get a government with a bit of common sense and motivation to actually help the population.
I suspect that any movement towards that is at least several generations away, as far as most of those “governments” are concerned.
Batteries and a fuel powered generator can be a good combination as the generator only needs to be run to charge the batteries, and should be running at near peak efficiency. One of the selling points in my. mulling over a solar/battery combo is that the batteries can act as a whole house UPS.
As for generators, I’m wondering if getting an LP fueled (or dual fuel) may be best because propane can be stored long term, the same is not true for gasoline or diesel fuel.
Eric, depends on how the gas/diesel is stored. At my farm, gas is in two way above ground standard barrel drums, both with an airtight shutoff. As long as airtight and not empty isn, will store indefinitely. Use one up, then refill and start using the other. Been there, done that.
Diesel is in an old 500 gallon fuel oil tank under the two barrels (farm fueling station), again with an airtight shutoff. Still, has to be conditioned, and used within about 3 years because of accumulating dead space. Not a farm problem given the diesel tractor.
Air tight is the key, petrol with ethanol will absorb moisture, breed bacteria and the volatile fractions will evaporate if the tank has a breather.
Rud ==> My life at sea taught me to condition all gasolines always. The cost is minimal compared to the problems caused by not doing so. However, I am talking of multiple 5 gallon jerrycans — not 100 gallon tanks.
I still condition all my home use gasoline — and have 2 gasoline home gen sets — one is a loaner for neighbors.
Rud, good points. The advantage of propane is that it has to be stored in an “air tight container” and the high vapor pressure at normal ambient temperatures helps to keep the air (and moisture) out. Other advantage is that I can cycle the containers though use on the grill and fire pit.
Gasoline with ethanol is the major problem. Use ethanol free and run the generator a couple time a year for a few minutes to prevent fuel problems. Propane is, of course, a good solution.
I do not want to be my own power company. I do not want to have to do the research, maintenance, or purchasing required for a personal system. I also do not want a large energy bomb stored on the side of my house.
That’s why I live in a city where municipal utilities have already been provided for use for the last 100 years. 200 amp two phase AC service works great already.
have you been reading about New York City’s plans (to pick just one example)?
No. I do not live in New York City and never will. They charge a separate income tax to live there. Why people pay extra to live in a shithole is beyond me.
2300SQ ft home, two stories, modern electric appliances, most lights LED, gas water heater/clothes drier, and the wife and I use 10kWh/day SoCal coast. I penciled it out to two PowerWalls for PV panel storage and a back up generator that would probably never be used and the cost would just pay for itself in its’ lifetime if I went off grid and was lucky. That’s today, who knows what the future will bring if they keep playing with renewable grid energy.
Australian households using tesla powerwall batteries and rooftop solar found out a flaw after a major windstorm bought down powerlines over a large area of treed suburbs in outer Melbourne.
When the powerwall is ‘flat’ it can only recharge from the grid. The roof top solar is more a top up and they wouldnt have noticed before when they run the battery right down.
The magical thinking is thinking science will stop these green lunatics.
But won’t the Gummint subsidise us all to buy the bigger V2G EV battery than we need for transport in order to support the fickles grid? The Gummint got plenty money for inflation reduction and noble causes.
As I’ve mentioned before, the average prosperity of the human population is dependent upon the true cost of energy, and the efficiency with which we use that energy.
For example, if you are building a new home in a city’s suburbs, I suspect that designing the house to maximize the energy production from the sun, could be an efficient way, if not the most efficient way, of producing electricity.
The design of such a house would require a flat roof that is tilted towards the direction of the sun. The entire roof would be built using solar tiles, instead of conventional tiles, so the total higher cost of construction would be offset by the normal cost of using conventional tiles.
If such a house is also connected to the grid, has battery storage, and the owner uses a BEV, then it seems obvious that such a system would produce very low-cost energy.
The average house with solar panels in Australia has only about 1/8th of the roof area covered with solar panels, and such panels are often not oriented towards the sun at the best angle for maximum electricity production.
The system I’ve described, to maximize the electricity production, would produce about 10 times more electricity than the average home, with solar panels, currently produces.
A home originally designed for high efficiency is much easier and cheaper than retrofitting most existing homes.
I agree. That’s one of the points in my post. However, the transition to new systems of energy-production will be a gradual process with many mistakes along the way. Through trial and error, and technological development, a general improvement in the efficiency of energy production should be achievable.
Windmills and solar farms on land that could be used for other purposes, are a blight. However, the roofs on most buildings are a wasted space that should be used to capture the energy from the sun. It’s not a solution that fits all circumstances, but could be a major contributor to cheap energy. Roof-top solar power in conjunction with battery storage and nuclear power, should be able to provide reliable, affordable, and effectively unlimited supplies of electricity, leaving the fossil fuels for essential products and processes, and transportation where BEVs are not practical.
Thats so false. I think its something like 3x more expensive to have rooftop solar as it is for a solar ‘farm’ when you look at scale.
“Utility-scale solar farms can cost as little as $0.03 per kWh, while residential rooftop solar systems typically cost $0.15 per kWh or more. “
That says 5x more but it doesnt matter it just so more expensive .
Of course solar farms are cheap and nasty as the costs are much higher when you have the grid batteries to store and provide power during morning and evening peak like the fossil fuel or hydro etc do….dams store their free water
Have you factored in delivery costs?
I recall reading a magazine article maybe 15 yrs ago about an off grid house that used
a wrecked and salvaged Toyota Prius hybrid for it’s power source. I can’t recall if there
was any solar/wind but I think he used some sort of an inverter and fueled the
Prius with a wood gas setup. I think it might have been a Mother Earth New issue
but am not sure, it was online.
The USA is heading back toward reality under Trump but the rest of the west is still pursuing the fantasy.
The fundamental error was letting intermittent generation into the grid on far more favourable terms than dispatchable generation.
Then there is the basic fact that solar, wind and batteries do not offer any benefit of scale. Using them as the generation/storage source on the grid means they are burdened by the high cost of transmission.
In Australia, it is now economic to go fully off-grid. In my case, I currently have gas and electricity connections. We are weaning off gas. The first big step was installing a 25kW wood burner a few years back. It has a fan that consumes 60W on its normal low setting. I installed a hotwater heat pump a few months back to get rid of the gas hot water. I have an induction cooktop that will replace the gas cooktop in a planned kitchen upgrade in February. I can then close the gas account.
My service fees for both gas and electricity currently total $2.66/day. 14 years ago the daily cost was $1.21. In 10 years the daily service fee will rise to $4.67 based on no acceleration in the rate of inflation. It is more likely to accelerate as more wealthy households defect from the grid leaving the poorer consumers to carry all the grid costs.
Saving $3.67/day, on average over ten years works out at $13,377, That goes a long way toward the cost of a suitable battery.
Australia is well suited to household off-grid solar/battery systems. I have operated half of my average daily demand off-grid for 12 years now using solar and lithium battery and am comfortable with the technology. The mild to warm climate means that household energy demand is quite modest. With my 6kW of rooftop solar, I produce an average surplus of 2.5kWh/day. However the output is often constrained by street overvoltage.
I would not install a battery system that is on-grid and available for control by the grid operator. You lose control of the battery cycling and that could dramatically reduce its service life. Also most are not capable of working without grid clocking.
You are certainly right in stating that less use of the grid will result in higher costs of the grid to other users. I could anticipate government action to protect poorer users. I think some form of that is already happening in some jurisdictions.
It’s not just how much energy is used per day. How much energy is being used during hours of good RE production (eg. middle of the day or windy times) vs how much needed for getting up&ready (before leaving for school/work) & how much during the evening peak demand (getting home, cooking dinner, showers)? Generation matched to same time of use doesn’t need storage. It’s times when demand exceeds generation that’s the problem that needs storage.
But demand & production also vary independently of each other for each season & multi-day weather cycles.
RE becomes more expensive when needing more storage that is used less often & to oversize RE generation to have spare capacity to recharge storage (could be wasted generation when there’s a glut).
LiFePO4 based storage could add 0.10USD to 0.15USD per kWh used later (0.15 to 0.23 AUD) including TCO & expected replacement of inverter & eventually batteries.
Conversion of excess power to hydrogen or pumped-hydro wastes more energy (less efficient).
Balancing grid is milliseconds, seconds, minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day, month to month, year to year. Balancing shorter periods is different to balancing over longer periods and needs both & everything inbetween. Not impossible but too much unreliable RE makes it more expensive to do so without relying on fossil fuels.
YMMV.
It’s not “but”, it‘s the main perk of this pastime. Per An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives (Chapter 8). Every time reality wins, either the Good and Great need more resources to fight it, or crack down on the evil witches (who must be somehow sabotaging the sure victory of nonsense) some more. And since it can never be defeated, indeed…
This concept of home based battery back up is a clever bit of hype from the Climate Alarmist blue skies thinking team.
It is only possible to come up with these flawed options if you refuse to accept reality and live in a make believe world, which they do.
The other aspect that needs to be considered beyond the impractical idea and the impossible scale of materials needed plus the insane economic numbers such a dream scheme presents is…safety.
Does anyone feel safe parking their electric car in the garage under the bedroom they are hoping to sleep in? If the answer to that real fire risk is no, imagine how comfortable people would not feel having three times the amount of battery risk stored in the house!
Most people do not put climate as a concern on any survey when asked, even those who regard climate as something they might be aware of rate concern for it down around tenth to twentieth on their list of things to worry about.
With that reality of public concern out there, does anyone imagine they would be persuaded to spend $36,000 on it?
“Moreover, local distribution systems—the poles and wires running down streets—will also have to be upgraded to handle the additional loads.”
In the UK local distribution is mostly underground, particularly towns and cities.
So upgrading that is going to be hugely disruptive and expensive.
It is one reason why cable tv didn’t catch on in the UK, there were no existing poles to string the cables and regulations require all services to be underground. The cost of laying cables underground was prohibitive.
Batteries: why is it assumed that whilst intermittency from solar (and wind) presents a problem for consumer supply on demand, it presents no problem for supply on demand when the batteries need recharging?
As I understand the reasoning: solar power fails; so use battery; solar power obligingly returns when battery discharges both to provide consumer supply and recharge battery and obligingly carries on supplying both until battery fully recharged; solar array has sufficient redundancy to recharge battery whilst supplying consumer needs.
I wonder what it is about the words “intermittency”, “unreliable”, “undispatchable” that some people just cannot understand.
Yeah, it can all work fine as long as the sun is shining and the wind is blowing.
Renewables might, notice the word might, be a practical solution or part solution for someone living and farming far from a transmission line but will be costly though setting up a transmission line will be even more costly for isolated cases like this. A country cannot set up a very costly connections with a supporting road network etc for a small number of unusual instances. These people need to find and pay for their own solutions without government help and subsidies. If they succeed good on them. I would be happy to see no subsidies but a number of small pilot projects, with public not government support, testing the feasibility of new alternatives.
A few years ago I ran the figures for installing a solar system to replace my grid hookup. I could not make it work.
I used an ROI of 10 years. It likely should have been 5 years if maintenance was figured in.
Because of a northern location with 2 winter months of little sunlight and high demand it was necessary to factor in a NG generator as opposed to vastly oversizing the solar system. That brought everything closer to possible but at that point the Canadian government chose to tax any fuel that could be used in a generator.
It would have been necessary to disconnect from the grid as feed in tariffs were much to low to justify the expense of a hookup and also dependent of external decisions.
I am handy so it would have been DIY without installation costs. I am now too old to do it myself so I suspect the costs would double and the lower cost for panels would be insignificant.
I have a hot water heating system to which a wood burner could be easily added but advancing age makes wood an expensive option since I would likely be unable to gather it myself.
Compared to the ease and reliability of our excellent grid system there was no contest.
In spite of a over reliance on wind in Alberta our system is still reasonably robust. I hope it lasts as long as I do.
There are situations where an off grid system is the only reasonably option but that is not for an old timer like me.
Good writeup but there needs to be mention of likely/probable “last mile” grid increases to accommodate the massive increase in electricity flows. Between heat pumps and EVs, overall electricity consumption could easily increase 50%.
Not mentioned in the above article: the massive increase in waste of electricity (with such ending up as heat energy dumped into the environment) associated with widespread use of home battery storage . . . in fact with ANY batteries that are used at large scale with interfacing to an AC grid.
Chemical batteries accept, store, and release electrical energy as DC voltage and current. This means that they must use an “inverter” circuit/device to convert their output to AC voltage and current to feed into the grid, and a “rectifier” circuit/device to convert AC grid input power into DC voltage and current to recharge the batteries (assuming the home doesn’t have a solar panel or wind turbine to provide direct DC charging).
AC-DC and DC-AC conversion is not 100% efficient. On top of that, chemical batteries have internal ohmic heating losses when being charged or discharged. Such batteries also have a typical self-discharge rate (energy drain) over time even if they are not being utilized. And one can also add the loss of energy that is associated with battery “thermal management” systems for home battery packs (similar to those required for EVs) if the ambient temperature extremes warrant such.
Even with a home supply of DC power (solar or wind), there is energy loss associated with the DC-DC “converter” that is needed to match the DC output voltage to the DC input voltage required by the EV.
If one goes through the inefficiencies in the entire chain of grid AC—>rectification to battery charging DC—>charging the battery—>continuous storage time at some average level-of-discharge in the battery—>discharging the battery DC—>inverter conversion to grid compatible AC, and then adds in the ohmic heating losses, the self-discharge losses, and the parasitic losses of the typical battery thermal management systems, one finds that the overall energy loss is about 10% of the total energy involved in the transfer routing.
Bottom line: the fundamental difference between DC energy storage by chemical batteries in a world based on AC electrical distribution grids means that the widespread use of such batteries to feed off, or supply to, a grid will end being the largest waste of electrical energy since the invention and use of the electrically-heated filament light bulb.
On a large scale, conversion efficiency from AC to DC and DC to AC is in the high 90’s, 98 to 99% efficiency is relatively common. The best batteries have better than 90% efficiency, IIRC which is better than pumped storage (hydro plant in reverse). The incentive to improve efficiency in both converters and batteries is to reduce waste heat. I would think 95% is achievable.
The most important argument against battery energy storage is the amount of materials needed too implement a 100% renewable electric generation.
FWIW, here’s what Google AI bot has to say on the subject of electric conversion device efficiencies:
“A typical DC to AC inverter has a conversion efficiency of around 90%, with high-quality inverters reaching up to 95% efficiency, while lower quality models may only reach 75-85%.”
“A typical AC to DC rectifier, depending on its design and load, usually has a conversion efficiency ranging from 89% to 92% at peak performance, with most falling within the 90% range; however, efficiency can drop at lower load levels.”
“A typical DC to DC converter can achieve a conversion efficiency of around 95%. This means that most of the input power is converted to usable output power, with only a small percentage lost as heat.”
So, considering just conversion efficiencies in the path of AC-to-DC-back to AC, and using Google’s highest efficiencies stated above (ka-ching!), one arrives at a 0.92*0.95 = 0.87 = 87% overall path efficiency, and that’s not including all the other losses (inefficiencies) that I mentioned.
I stand by my post, and don’t believe overall in-out efficiencies close to 95% are possible with commercial battery systems at any practical cost, regardless of scale.
89% to 92% efficiency would be about right for a low cost AC to DC converter putting out a few tens of watts. I’ve built converters with better than 95% efficiency at the kilowatt level and would expect megawatt level converters to have 98 to 99+% efficiency.
Google AI bot is worthless.
“Megawatt level” converters for home use and home EV charging . . . who knew!
1) AC to DC is only have the full path going through a battery. Assuming one could achieve an equally amazing 95% efficiency for the DC to AC part at the kilowatt level, that still results in 0.95*0.95 = .903 = 90% overall path efficiency, while still not accounting for all the other inefficiencies that I noted.
2) I daresay that Google’s AI bot uses information from MANY more sources than does a typical poster here on WUWT, including myself . . . consequently, I’m sorry to see that you find it “worthless”. Got any facts to go with that?
Another problem with battery rectifiers to convert to AC AND grid frequency 50Hz or 60 Hz is the battery ‘follows the grid frequency’ so is reducing frequency stability .It cant maintain or lead the grid frequency like a large rotating mass generator in fossil- hydro-geotherm generation can
And we all know the grid frequency has to be stable across the grid -by definition- and fairly small deviations will result in load shedding to maintain it.
That was South Australias blackout problem. The AC 500MW interconnector from interstate( powered and stable by coal generation) just cut out in micro seconds leaving a whole state with no stable frequency and very little generation, cascading quickly to a complete state wide blackout
There’s a more subtle reason in that a synchronous generator with rotating inertia and damper windings provides a stabilizing effect for both frequency and voltage. Something similar can be done with an appropriate inverter design along batteries having a high short term output capability. Most inverters do not have the capability.
For a whole house battery system, it wouldn’t be difficult to get 98% efficiency – at 10kW the difference between 97% and 98% efficiency is 100 watts of heat, so the 1% increase in efficiency reduces the cost of heat sinking.
My point has been that the most important argument against using batteries to meet 100% renewable generation is the enormous amount of raw materials needed – having 100% efficiency in battery storage would not a bit of difference in the impracticality of 100% renewable generation.
As for Google AI, I’d trust the data sheets and my own measurements more than an AI app. One reason that GaN based chargers are so small is that the higher efficiency achievable with GaN reduces the amount off cooling needed.
Spot on.
Some have it and it works. All he time? I don’t know since you are not allowed to go off grid. It does pay itself back so it’s interesting to save money.
But I don’t want a large battery in my home. I see EV always parking outside their house instead of their garage.
The EV battery also always come back. Why are those people so stupid? Give electricity at night, charge during the day when the sun shines. One problem. You leave in the morning so you need a charged EV. Those people always go from the premise that people are home during the day. If I worked from then why would I need an expensive car? A cheap petrol car will do for the few displacements I make.
And why would I risk my battery lifespan? It might also be more dangerous to turn into a giant ball of fire.
I actually have a system like this, ON MY SAIL BOAT. It has solar panels, a windmill, a large bank of storage batteries, an inverter to power the 110v loads inside the boat when I don’t have a source of 110/220, a 6KW diesel generator to be able to run my air conditioning, a shore-power connection when I am at a dock, a powerful AC-driven battery charger, and a high power alternator on my main engine to be able to charge the batteries when I am motoring. Plus lots of large wires, many switches, three other batteries to start the main engine, the genset, and run the anchor windlass, several automatic battery parallel devices, monitoring equipment, and a full time engineer to make it all work. It started 25 years ago, on a smaller boat, and the concepts were transferred to the current boat when my wife told me that we needed a bigger boat(!).
And since the boat is parked in the canal behind my house, I can use it to power the house if the grid goes down. This is in addition to the 7.5 kw gasoline generator that came with the house. It will run one of the air conditioners and the fridge, plus small loads.
It is very complicated to set up, but it started because my wife wanted to be able to heat her cup of tea in a microwave while the boat is at anchor, without having to run the main engine or a genset. It is not for the faint-hearted or non-techies. I have had to replace two battery chargers that I killed because of misalignment of various switches. No fires.
How does adding more storage work when the generation capacity at these same residences must also be increased by a large factor to recharge these batteries during shorter days?