Manhattan Contrarian by Francis Menton 2/1/2022
It should be glaringly obvious that, if we are shortly going to try to convert to a “net zero” carbon emissions energy system based entirely on wind, sun and batteries, then there needs to be serious focus on the feasibility and costs of such a system. The particular part of such a prospective system that needs the most focus is the method of energy storage, its cost and, indeed, feasibility. That part needs focus because, as wind and solar increase their share of generation over 50% of the total, storage becomes far and away the dominant driver of the total costs. Moreover, there is no clear way to identify some fixed amount of storage that will be sufficient to make such a system reliable enough to power a modern economy without full backup from dispatchable sources. This also should be glaringly obvious to anyone who thinks about the problem for any amount of time.
And yet, as recently as a couple of weeks ago, it seemed like the entire Western world was racing forward to “net zero” based on wind and sun without anyone anywhere giving real thought to the problem of the amount of storage needed, let alone its cost, and let alone whether any fixed amount of storage could ever fully assure complete reliability. A retired, independent guy named Roger Andrews had done some calculations back in 2018 for test cases of California and Germany, which had showed that at least 30 days’ of storage would be needed to back up a fully wind/solar system. Andrews’s work showed that storage costs just to be sufficient to match actual wind/solar intermittency patterns for 2017 would likely cause a multiplication of the cost of electricity by something in the range of a factor of 14 to 22. But Andrews did not even get to the point of considering how much storage might be needed in worst case scenarios of lengthy winter wind or sun droughts.
And then Andrews died suddenly in early 2019, and nobody immediately took up where he left off.
But then a few weeks ago I discovered at Watts Up With That some new work from someone named Ken Gregory (again, a retired, independent guy — funny, isn’t it?), who produced a spreadsheet for the entire United States again showing that about 30 days’ storage would be needed to back up a fully wind/solar system. (Cost for the storage, assuming all energy use gets electrified: about $400 trillion.)
And now, some others are getting into the act. And none too soon. A guy named Roger Caiazza has a blog called Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York. Caiazza, as you might by now have guessed, is another independent retired guy. In the past few months, he has turned his attention principally to the energy transition supposedly getting underway here in New York State, as a result of something called the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act of 2019 (the Climate Act). The Climate Act created a gaggle of bureaucracies, and the end of 2021 saw those bureaucracies utter something they call the “Scoping Plan,” laying out how New York is going to go from its current energy system to the nirvana of electrification of everything together with “net zero” emissions by no later than 2050.
The Scoping Plan is a massive document (some 330 pages plus another 500+ pages of appendices) of breathtaking incompetence. The basic approach, summarized by me in this post of December 29, 2021, is that designated “expert” bureaucrats working for the State, themselves having no actual idea how to achieve “net zero” from an engineering perspective, will get around that problem by simply ordering the people to achieve the “net zero” goal by a date certain. Then, presumably some engineers will magically emerge to work out the details. The thousands of people who put this thing together apparently do not regard proof of cost or feasibility as any part of their job. As to the key problem of energy storage to achieve “net zero” goals, the Scoping Plan, in nearly 1000 pages of heft, never even gets to the point of recognizing that the MWH (as opposed to MW) is the key unit that must be considered to assess issues of cost and feasibility.
More:
https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-1-31-more-focus-on-the-impossible-costs-of-a-fully-windsolarbattery-energy-system
