By David Wojick
I keep reading how big batteries are all it takes to make wind and solar reliable as the sole grid electricity source. The reality is that making wind and solar work at all requires a fantastic amount of battery backup, far more than is possible.
Below is an example using the PJM grid. PJM is America’s biggest grid operator, with a territory covering the Mid-Atlantic and points west. Their territory includes the Washington, DC metro area, where all the federal bigwigs live, making it a good place to start. I also live there.
We are quantifying a fantasy, so let’s keep it very simple. In fact, the basic question is why hasn’t PJM done this simple analysis? They do a lot of sophisticated grid modeling. Or maybe they have done this crucial assessment, but it is a secret, which is even worse.
Consider a single day in a typical peak demand summer heatwave. The heatwave is due to a stagnant high-pressure system called a Bermuda high, so there is not enough wind to generate usable wind power, no matter how much generating capacity is available.
It is sunny during the day, so let’s assume that for 8 hours we get enough solar to meet demand (or, as I prefer to call it, to meet need). For the other 16 hours, we meet demand using batteries. We import nothing because our neighbors are in the same needy boat.
Finally, for simplicity, I assume the demand is at the peak level for the entire 24 hour day. This overestimates things a bit, but we will find that does not matter. A fancier analysis would use a typical demand curve. PJM can handle that.
My example year is 2030, as that is a standard near-term transition target year for which we have reasonable estimates of peak demand. Here then are the very simple numbers.
PJM’s estimate peak demand for 2030 is about 180,000 MW.
Meeting that for 16 hours with batteries requires 2,880,000 MWh of usable storage.
Usable storage is between 20% and 80% of nameplate battery capacity, hence 60%.
Thus we need 4,800,000 MWh of nameplate battery capacity.
Storage facility capital costs vary, but $500,000 per MWh is a reasonable estimate.
This gives a total cost of $2.4 trillion, or $2,400,000,000,000, for the batteries to make wind and solar reliable in this case. This fantastic cost is clearly not feasible.
There are things that could make this number go down a bit, such as reduced cost per MWh. But given last year saw just 130,000 MWh installed worldwide, the production capacity does not exist, so we are talking about new mines and factories. It actually cannot be done by 2030, not even close.
But the realistic numbers would be much higher if this fantasy played out because low wind, near-peak heatwaves often last for several days, even a week. Ten trillion dollars is easily possible. We are, after all, talking about hundreds of thousands of tractor-trailer sized batteries, basically containers full of expensive chemicals. Moreover, this is just for PJM.
Batteries simply cannot make a transition to wind and solar power feasible. The amount, and hence the cost, of storage is far too great.
Given the simplicity of this analysis, using readily available data, the big question is why are these impossible numbers not already widely known? PJM and their big utilities all do detailed modeling and supposed reliability assessments. So does NERC, whose sole mission is reliability. Many utilities file annual Integrated Resource Plans with their state regulators, typically looking out 20 years or more.
That battery backup cannot make wind and solar powered grids possible is obvious given these incredible numbers. The electric power industry must know this, but their silence is deafening.
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And if we converted all transportation and home/business HVAC to electric, the numbers just get that much worse. Green dreaming is not a viable path forward for civilization.
They don’t like civilization. At least, not for the masses. The elite will have to make do with civilization in order to manage non-civilization for the masses.
In the UK just 23% of energy used is electric. The Net Zeroids are so focussed on how electricity is generated, they just don’t (or won’t) consider how much is going to be needed or how the hugely increased load will be distributed and delivered when the other 87% has to come from electricity.
In the UK £billions are earmarked to build new HT lines to connect up all the wind and solar installations scattered across the landscape and territorial waters, but nothing is being done to the local, low voltage distribution so it can handle all the “free” electricity that houses and buildings will need by 2050.
Several years ago a Prof of Electrical Engineering at Southampton University pointed out this problem of the local low voltage distribution in the UK to an outfit pushing the line that EVs could be used to power the grid.
He reckoned that most of that low voltage network would need to be replaced which would involve digging up all the non motorway roads in the country. It had been estimated some years before that that would cost at least £60bn. Today much more.
And we all know what batteries do. Also, what would their life be? Are there enough raw materials?
It isn’t just the impossible cost. There isn’t enough lithium and cobalt mineral resource in the entire world to make such an PJM installation technically feasible. And even if a stationary PJM grid battery went with LiFePo (no cobalt), there remains the lithium problem.
General rule of thumb. No matter how hard you wish for some destination, if you cannot get there from here you won’t.
Right. The question is why doesn’t PJM and NERC say this in their long term assessments?
Call me cynical, but it’s because there are profits to be made by utilities. Any batteries installed can be added to the rate base, even if they are insufficient to store the power needed to back up intermittent sources.
In the UK the average current life of batteries being installed is 1.5 to 2 hours.
In November 2024 the UK underwent a period of dunkelflaute that lasted 5 days. We were absolutely reliant on gas to get through that.
Correct. It’s all about the money, not people’s lives and livelihoods.
NEW ENGLAND ELECTRICITY 100% FROM WIND AND SOLAR by 2050?
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/new-england-electricity-100-from-wind-and-solar-by-2050
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New England has Net Zero nut cases. They know nothing about energy systems and fantasize lots of nonsense.
“Keep it in the ground”, they say. “All electricity from wind and solar”, they say.
When presented with numbers and facts their eyes glaze over
Here is a simple analysis, if no fossil fuels, no nuclear, and minimal other sources of electricity
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/vermont-example-of-electricity-storage-with-tesla-powerwall-2-0s
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It is assumed, 1) all W/S output, based on historic weather data, is loaded into batteries, 2) all demand is drawn from batteries, based on historic load on the grid, as published by ISO-NE.
An annual storage balance was created, which needed to stay well above zero; the batteries are not allowed to “run dry” in bad W/S years. The balance was used to determine the wind and solar capacities needed to achieve it.
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New England would need a battery system with a capacity of about 10 TWh of DELIVERABLE electricity from batteries to HV grid.
Daily W/S output would be fed to the batteries, 140 TWh/y
Daily demand would be drawn from the batteries, 115 TWh/y in 2024
Battery system roundtrip loss, HV to HV, would be 25 TWh/y, more with aging
Transmission and Distribution to users incur additional losses of about 8%, or 0.08 x 115 = 9.2 TWh
The battery system would cover any multi-day W/S lulls throughout the year
Batteries would supplement W/S output, as needed, 24/7/365
W/S would charge excess output into the batteries, 24/7/365
Tesla recommends not charging to more than 80% full and not discharging to less than 20% full, to achieve normal life of 15 years and normal aging at 1.5%/y.
The INSTALLED battery capacity would need to be about 10 TWh / (0.6, Tesla factor x aging factor x 0.9, outage factor) = 18.5 TWh, delivered as AC at battery outlet.
The turnkey cost would be about $600/installed kWh, delivered as AC at battery outlet, 2024 pricing, or $600/kWh x 18.5 billion kWh = $11.1 trillion, about every 15 years.
I did not mention annually increasing insurance costs of risky W/S projects.
If 50% were borrowed from banks, the cost of amortizing $5.5 trillion at 6% over 15 years = $557 billion/y
If 50% were from Owners, the cost of amortizing $5.5 trillion at 10% over 15 years = $708 billion/y
The two items total $1265 billion/y, about the same as the New England GDP.
There are many more cost items
Less 50% subsidies (tax credits, 5-y depreciation, loan interest deduction)
Subsidies shift costs from project Owners to ratepayers, taxpayers, government debt
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/battery-system-capital-costs-losses-and-aging
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No banks will finance W/S projects at acceptable interest rates and no insurance companies will insure them at acceptable premiums, no matter what the woke bureaucrats are pronouncing.
The sooner the U-turn, the better for New England, US and Europe
“Making PJM all wind and solar would cost over $2.4 trillion in battery backup”That estimate is grossly too low.
See above analysis.
See how 10TWh increases to 18.5 TWh, due to various factors.
Elon Musk is one of the worst scammers of all in pushing solar and batteries as grid electricity solutions. He regularly re-posts several solar and battery solution scammers on the X platform making grandiose claims about solar power. The guy is wickedly smart, he must know it’s not true.
So on one hand, he is brutally honest about what Democrat Party has become, yet he engages in similar mass delusion deceptions.
Maybe he wants all that Texas-NM Permian Basin natural gas (methane) for his fleet of Starships he wants to send to Mars?
I presume those Starships won’t burn any fuel- they’ll all be all electric. /s
I bet he’s not wanting Grok to be reliant on unreliable wind and solar 🙂
There is also the need for excess power generation to charge the batteries which will never be possible unless enough conventional capacity is kept on line to do it. First there has to be enough RE to regularly meet 100% of demand, then more is required to charge the store but it will be tapped whenever the wind is low at night so it will never charge beyond a small fraction of the power required for a serious wind drought.
To recharge with renewables requires an overbuild several times that needed to meet demand so this is another big fantasy. For example assuming perfect solar you would need twice as much for charging. Cloudy days raise that number and these can be successive.
Does the cost estimate include the land and the connections to the grid?
Land yes but not interconnection transmission which can be big.
Maryland is one of the most liberal states in the PJM. It’s looking at more natural gas and nuclear but they are very slow to actually build anything.
Happily there is a lot of looking not just in MD.
California likes to tout its mandated installations of Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESSs) as the way to a greener, emissions free future. But the BESSs are colocated at natural gas fired generation facilities.
But the reality is they are simply using the BESSs as peak demand levelers and shifting the CO2 emissions to later in the night. They bring the BESSs online around 4pm as the demand increases and then the BESSs are depleted to 20% by 8pm and they are done. They recharge them at colocated Natural gas fired generation power stations from 10 pm to 5 am when demand is lowest. The emissions are just delayed and gas turbines plants get a more steady utilization by recharging the BESS at off peak.
They are simply using the BESS to meet the peak demand period, thus delaying Cal ISO having to buy expensive spot market electricity and from other grid interconnects. Or PGE of SoCalEdison building more gas turbines power plants. But this EV recharge overnight will rapidly become less feasible as that is when many Californians are recharging their EVs at home while they sleep.
All this does is make the grid more complex, close management mandatory, and thus the electricity is more expensive. And the emissions are the same.
“We are quantifying a fantasy, so let’s keep it very simple. In fact, the basic question is why hasn’t PJM done this simple analysis?”
Yes, you are quantifying a fantasy, and PJM has not done it because the fantasy is yours alone. No-one is proposing that batteries would be used in that way.
NS, I couldn’t resist a bit of simple quick googled pushback. According to your Australian Energy Market Operator (AMEO), and your Australian Renewable Energy National Agency (ARENA), what you just denied (no one is proposing) is exactly what they are just now proposing.
Please up your game. This is too easy.
Links, please! I don’t believe it.
Mr. Stokes: You should have said nothing, now you’ll be stuck good.
Nobody has produced those links.
So Rud didn’t give links- you are incapable of finding that info?
It isn’t true.
‘No-one is proposing that batteries would be used in that way.’
So at night with no wind, how would you propose that batteries would be used?
As they usually are.
You’re evading the problem. The problem is how to keep the lights on when there is a prolonged wind calm. In the UK these can last a week, and can occur in winter or summer. There are frequent shorter periods of calm too. In the calms you typically average 10% of faceplate, with dips of some hours well below that. You can see it happening in real time on Gridwatch.
Batteries as usually used are not going to help with such episodes.
How do you propose to supply? Take some specific jurisdiction for which we have numbers – I have suggested the UK in the past, but pick anywhere you like. How are you going to supply? List the MW production by technology.
I don’t actually think the advocates of this stuff really believe it themselves, any more than the Xosa did when they slaughtered their cattle and destroyed their crops. It was a sort of fugue state and they just sleep walked into disaster.
“pick anywhere you like”
OK, South Australia. Here is the whole recent history, monthly. They ditched coal in 2016-7 (blew up their stations). They use gas (of which they have quite a lot) when the dominant wind and solar need augmenting. But gas use has just gone down and down. Big money saved.
They also import from Victoria, which is backed up by hydro. Battery use (blue) is tiny, even though they have the original big battery. They have better uses for it, and it makes big money.
Nick, you neglected to mention that SA also uses a fleet of diesel generators from time to time to keep the lights on in SA.
Why would this be necessary?
I neglected nothing. I showed complete usage. Distillate is a brownish color, below gas. 0.03% of total in June 2025. Most of that in remote areas.
Nick, let’s get to the crux of reliance on renewables in SA.
Mostly what the outcome has been is to make SA the MOST EXPENSIVE RETAIL ELECTRICITY in Australia, and almost the world.
What are households paying now – ~ 40 cents a kWh?
They have nearly the cheapest wholesale, just behind Vic, and way cheaper than the coal states. The retail margin is high, some of the reasons are legitimate. But wholesale measures cost of generation.
I’m sure SA consumers are so comforted to know that their wholesale electricity cost is purported to be lower than other states.
Not.
Meanwhile they’re hoping that they get a complimentary jar of Vaseline with their power bills, ’cause they know they’re taking it up the jaxie because of the renewables energiewende. (Heil!)
SA is also a complete minnow when it comes to electricity use and production
They have good wind sometimes, but also plenty of GAS for their tiny needs.
Entire continent with population the size of Florida .
Mostly in a few large cities.
IOW, unlike any other place that comes to mind.
Also relatively wealthy due to vast natural resources, again unlike most places.
Disingenuous as usual.
The reason Victoria has the lowest prices is because that have a lot of very cheap BROWN COAL
“and way cheaper than the coal states.”
Victoria is a coal-powered state.
What REALLY costs money is incorporating unreliable supplies in the grid.
Only a couple of weeks ago, Victoria was using80% fossil fuels, as often happens.
They rely TOTALLY on that solid CHEAP BROWN COAL.
You can’t use pricing, either retail or wholesale, as a decisive indicator, its so affect by government policies.
The earlier chart you put up doesn’t show what is needed.
First it doesn’t show that its possible to dispense with conventional. On the contrary, it shows that convenstional is essential to keeping the lights on.
Second, you need to show that the cost of a system consisting of wind+solar+conventional is cheaper, on an NPV basis, than a system consisting of just conventional. I have never seen any quantified attempt to show this and don’t believe it. LCOE doesn’t cut it by the way. What’s needed is a proper NPV analysis, all costs included, only usable production included.
Its extraordinary that rigorous methods of investment appraisal which have been commonplace in Western compnies for over a hundred years seem to be totally ignored when it comes to governments considering investments in energy provision, and people rely on charts which show nothing relevant or arguments which are as vague as literary criticism.
“First it doesn’t show that its possible to dispense with conventional.”
It shows that it can be greatly reduced, and has been. That will continue. That is what matters both for the economics (saving fuel costs) and emissions. It may be that we will continue to need some gas. The idea is to minimise it, and that is happening. But SA has radically improveded in ten years, and further radical improvement is likely.
“Second, you need to show that the cost of a system consisting of wind+solar+conventional is cheaper”
The big test, as I keep emphasising, is wholesale price. If SA can keep that going, and maintain production, they are doing something right, whatever your accounting theories.
What you really mean is that the use of conventional power has been reduced. That doesn’t reduce the capital investment nor the expense of maintenance, etc. Therefore, much of the COST of conventional power production remains.
This is ADDED to the cost of renewable production as the consumer prices show. The only way for renewable prices to be lower than conventional is to, as you say, blowup the conventional plants and live with renewables only.
Nick you talk about emissions but totally ignore the fact that Australia is exporting huge quantities of coal. In fact the IEA say that Australia has almost 50% of the world’s coal mining for export projects underway, 46 out of 95,. Next in line are South Africa with 14, and Canada 9.
Australia is merely exporting its emissions.
“The big test, as I keep emphasising, is wholesale price.” And that is why you are wrong. The issue is not wholesale price at all, its delivered price 24/7/365.
I don’t have ‘personal accounting theories’. Investment appraisal methodology is covered in scores of Corporate Finance textbooks and is practiced at all significant sized companies in the West.
The big test is not price, whether wholesale or retail, because prices are subject to lots of external influence, particularly regulation and subsidies. You don’t need price. You need cash flow.
Or, to be a bit clearer, regulation can affect cash flows, so a company will take account of those effects in doing investment appraisal. But, when considering the case for renewables and the energy transition, regulation does not affect the cash flows and should not figure in them.
The way, the only correct way, to do investment appraisal and comparison is with Net Present Value Analysis. Read Brealey and Myers ‘Corporate Finance’. Its so universally understood and practised that the formulae are built into all spreadsheets as functions.
Now, your chart and account. First of all, your chart doesn’t show or help with the critical issue: how is the UK to get through a week or ten day calm in winter, when there is negligible wind and also no solar, because the days are shorter and the sun lower? Where is the power going to come from? For a full week?
Your chart doesn’t shed any light on that, and that is the key issue.
Second, nothing you have showed or stated is any kind of investment appraisal. You cannot do it in this vague literary critical way. Its a quantitative discipline. There is only one way to show that wind and solar make sense to add to a conventional system, and that is to do the NPV analysis and show it.
The fact that you refuse to do it, even in your aside about ‘personal accounting theories’ denigrate the very concept, and the fact that no other renewable advocate seems to have done it either, tells me that there is no financial justification.
This is business case 101. You have a proposal, fine, make the case and show it. You have not made any case on adding renewables which would get any project funded at any major company. In fact, as I say, appear before any Finance Committee to offer them an account of the case in the terms you offer would get you shown the door in short order.
But Nick, the cost of generation is only one part of the whole issue. What consumers have to pay is the full generation +system cost, plus profit. Its the system costs that kill wind and solar.
If SA actually produced anything except rather good wines.. it might mean something.
As it is, SA’s energy use is tiny compared to the main states.
And I note you don’t include the regular imports from Victoria’s Brown Coal power.
Oh cmon Nick, more details please. For a start, please explain how a battery attached to a home solar system can deliver sufficient energy in winter when the total solar output is a fraction of the residence power requirements, let alone recharge a battery. And the power authorities now want to use home batteries to keep a renewables grid alive! They’re dreaming, of course.
“As they usually are.”
I assume you mean keeping the power on for a few minutes while the diesel generators and backup gas turbines ramp up and take over the load and then getting recharged by these reliable sources.
The fundamental question is how to supply demand in these circumstances. I keep asking Nick to explain this for the UK. The numbers are different from PJM’s but the question is the same. Never get an answer.
There is only one way to do it, and that’s to install enough gas. So you end up with a system where there is some legacy nuclear, wind, solar. Then you have a lot of gas. You have to turn the gas on and off to match the peaks and troughs of the wind and solar which makes it less efficient. Probably your legacy plant covers about 25% of peak demand, so you have in addition to the wind and solar a very large amount of gas standing by and inefficiently switching in and out as the weather and daily cycle fluctuates.
The exact numbers will vary from place to place, but the principle is the same. There is nothing else that will keep the lights on. Unless there is, and we are all missing it? But then, why doesn’t Nick or someone just tell us what it is?
Nick usually limits himself in these discussions to the claim that the wind and the sun are free, and that the savings on fuel cost justify installing them, rather than just running on the gas in more efficient continuous mode. But he has never, despite repeated requests, given even a sketch of the numbers showing this to be true and how it would work in some specific jurisdiction.
In the end this is what the current climate debate comes down to. Never mind whether the hockey stick was valid, whether there is a pending climate catastrophe, whether hurricanes or droughts are increasing – the plain fact is that the only policies which the climatists have been able to come up with are demonstrably impossible, because of intermittency.
All they have managed to come up with is: move heating to heat pumps and transport to EVs,thus doubling demand, while moving generation to wind and solar. And they are trying to do this while having no solution to intermittency. And without having enough international traction for it even to make any difference to global emissions, even could it be done.
Do the numbers for the3 UK or a US grid operator or anywhere in the world, it cannot be done. So it won’t be done. But our intellectually bankrupt political classes will produce a lot of blackouts and other suffering before the mania finally dies.
How are they supposed to be used?
Fingers crossed and wishful thinking
You need enough battery storage to provide electricity for the longest period without wind and solar, and since we don’t KNOW that longest period, that is a humungous amount of storage.. Average aren’t good enough.
And if you assume a wind solar capacity factor of 20% (as if) then you need an installed capacity of at least 5 times the peak demand to have a hope of meeting demand, even over a short period.
The whole thing is just a monumental waste of time money and resources.
And we know that greenie climate cultists, like Nick, DO NOT CARE about time, money and resources or they pretend to be totally oblivious to the problem..
Well in November 2024 the UK went through a period of dunkelflaute that lasted 5 days and was almost totally reliant on gas to power the grid.
Nick – ‘No-one is proposing that batteries would be used in that way.’
A few posts later, Nick explains that instead of using batteries, people will use gas.
Just like Britain is doing at present, as wind power has dropped dramatically.
TLDR – Batteries will work, if you use gas instead of batteries.
Glad you agree that net zero via wind, solar and batteries is a fantasy. I will quote you.
There really are no engineering proposals for net zero, just arm waving, which is my basic point. But the two big storage arms are batteries and hydrogen. Using batteries to make wind and solar reliable is a very common concept.
Don’t forget to add in the energy from fairy dust and unicorn pharts. Problem solved!
For New York State’s net zero plan, they are called DEFRs (Dispatchable Emissions Free Resources) instead of residues from fairies and unicorns. Somewhere I think I have a catalog of DEFRs here so I can order some. Hmm. Where could it be?
In am constantly reminded on what they call in NY a dispatchable, emissions-free resources (DEFR). This does no exist. There is a reason they are playing chicken, there is hope among the thinking that someone other than their own group hit the wall first. One the first one fails, then they can easily throw up their hands, and say, “well who knew?”. The cool aid drinkers will scream it was big oil and blame everyone else, but people without power because of this failure will not be happy. Tasty cool aid only goes so far when you are freezing to death, or cannot charge your only means of transportation as mandated by your government.
“That battery backup cannot make wind and solar powered grids possible is obvious given these incredible numbers. The electric power industry must know this, but their silence is deafening.”
_________________________
I don’t know for certain, but I suspect that the deafening silence has to do with public relations.
If the power companies were to go on the offensive and educate the public about the massive cost and other problems with wind/solar/batteries involving physics and engineering, the pro-wind and solar environmental movement would probably push back with a propaganda and demonization campaign against the power companies. If PR is all important to the power companies, they are probably deafly afraid of having that happen.
Given that a sizable percentage of the public is likely to believe anything the environmental movement and the Democrats say, the power companies probably feel that keeping their mouths shut is the best policy.
A compliant leftist mass media that aligns itself with the environmentalists will only make matters worse for the power companies. You can crunch numbers (including the financial costs) all you want, but the Left’s hatred and mistrust of corporate America will always play a large roll in their thought processes and the conclusions they draw.
B.S. and propaganda work when enough people are naive enough to actually believe it.
You left out lawfare.
Most greens would cut themselves trying to use a screwdriver. Technological innumeracy is a requirement for a True Believer, or depraved indifference as to the outcome of their schemes.
‘Given the simplicity of this analysis, using readily available data, the big question is why are these impossible numbers not already widely known?’
I’m sure they are by many engineers at PJM, as well as many of those among its member utilities. The problem is that the ‘transition’ to so-called green energy dovetails nicely with the goals of the Left, which control many of the PUCs within PJM, as well as the useful idiots, i.e, the crony capitalists, that Lenin accurately predicted would gladly provide the rope needed to hang them.
This is a piece by my colleague John McBrattney on the impossibiity of charging big batteries.
(57) Grid-scale Electricity Storage – why it cannot work
Don’t bother about driving your EV, (if that’s what you think your Dodge Ram is for) because its actually cheap house battery..according to one clever-clod..
“after researching home batteries I realised that the cost/KWh of storage was
a lot lower in a car and the battery is mobile. I got a 60 kWh battery for $60,000, while a Tesla Powerwall costs $15,000 for 13 kWh”
Of course electric utilities know that this is BS but to publicly say so risks incurring the wrath of the grifting politicians who are pushing it. That’s because they are beholden to the local public service commission whose members are picked by those same grifting politicians for rate increases.
Another technical question. In the scenario presented in this post, where does the wave forming come from in order to maintain proper grid frequency and the inertia to ride through disruptions? Isn’t that what happened in Spain a few weeks ago? Just curious.
The solid state batteries that many are drooling over are not workable in you car because you might melt your house to the ground during charging. Yet, they may be workable for battery backup? The wind and solar crowd make too much $$$ to go quietly. So maybe there is something there??
Actually, what will happen is the house generator market will explode. That’s how they plan to backstop this. I have a buddy near Lake Travis just west of Austin that is going to spend $20K on one. This will be the stop gap. Most can’t even think of dropping that much on a generator and the Pols know it. Just another thing for them to talk about as-nauseam. Generator justice.
David,
As you know, the problem is political policies, allowing too many people to be paid to tell others what they can and cannot do. This is the biggest social change that I have experienced in my 84 years. The remedy is to stop paying many of these people, whose net contribution to society is negative and big in dollars.
There has to be an organised campaign to highlight this problem and its solution so that folk can form their own conclusions. It includes bureaucrats as well as pollies. There are simply too many of them, with too many powers granted or assumed. Their effort does not help national productivity and national wealth. It allows strange beliefs to be converted to laws and regulations that harm.
In recent decades, this cluster has honed their skills in the art of ignoring contrary evidence and cancelling those who present evidence counter to their views. A social correction is way overdue. Geoff S
David, I have done the same analysis here in Oz and put the numbers to my federal member of Parliament and his associates. As you say, the silence is deafening. The last time I did this, he did not even acknowledge receipt of my letter, which he is obliged to do. This guy even admitted about 3 years ago that he thought nuclear energy would be probably cheaper than renewables but in the party room he obviously remains mute. Politicians and energy are 2 words that should never be in the same sentence.
Fire up all fossil fuel and nuclear generators. Build new fossil fuel and nuclear generators. Remove all wind and solar from the grid.
And this still doesn’t mention how we could charge those batteries.
I always chuckle over over smartasses mentioning batteries as grid backup.
Well since a battery backup for a single house works so well and 24/7/365 (SARCALARM), not to mention the initial cost plus it’s replacemente every 10 years (rough conservative estimate) I would loudly say: GO FOR IT.
Just don’t come whining afterwards about the bill or say “how could we have known that it wouldn’t work?”
Well you roundly ignored sarcasm…amongst others.
Sadly, when I bring this expense of batteries to backup wind/solar to the attention of some in my “green” orientated country, they say “Fine. We’re ok if we don’t have electricity all the time. Did it before. Happens now. We can live with that. We gotta save the planet.”
None of this has ever mattered. Anyone with a functioning mind and an honest appraisal and examination has always known all of this “renewable” energy nonsense was a bunch of left-wing hogwash. It may have a use as a complement or a power source in remote locations, but it will never suffice to power an industrial economy. The powers that be have always know this limiting fact so their secrecy indicates something nefarious.