Why Renewable Energy Is a Technical Reality But An Economic Disaster
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/why-renewable-energy-technical-reality-economic-disaster-126446February 23, 2020
2020 may turn out to be the year of the battery. The Trump administration has made grid-level battery backup a focus of its Energy Storage Grand Challenge -- an effort to create an all-American supply chain for advanced battery technologies. Meanwhile, Texas, which is the only state to run its own electricity grid, is offering up to $9000 a megawatt-hour for peak summer battery power. And on the other side of the world in South Australia, Tesla has been asked to up the capacity of its mammoth battery in the desert to 193.5 megawatt-hours, or about double the storage capacity of the entire Texas state grid....
...Thanks to the batteries, South Australia now has more reliable power, but at a price: it has the most expensive power in the country, costing roughly twice as much as the US national average for 2019. This, in a country that is (by far) the world's largest exporter of coal and tied with Qatar as the world's biggest exporter of liquefied natural gas.
The problem for South Australia (and other aspiring renewables powerhouses) is that the economics of renewable energy get worse and worse as you scale them up. That's the opposite of traditional economics of scale. With a coal-fired power plant, as you build bigger, your power gets cheaper, smoother, and more reliable. With wind or solar, it's exactly the opposite: the bigger you build, the more expensive, more volatile, and more unreliable your power supply becomes. No one ever heard of battery backup for coal-fired baseload power....
