Astronomical battery cost looms over “renewables”
By David Wojick |December 15th, 2022|Energy|120 Comments
The amount of storage needed to make renewables reliable is so huge that even if the cost dropped fantastically we still could not afford it.
We now know that the battery storage for the entire American grid is impossibly expensive, thanks to a breakthru study by engineer Ken Gregory. Looking at several recent years he analyzed, on an hour by hour basis, the electricity produced with fossil fuels. He then calculated what it would have taken in the way of storage to produce the same energy using wind and solar power. He did this by scaling up those year’s actual wind and solar production.
Based on his work, which only covered 48 states, our round working estimate of the required storage for the whole country is an amazing 250 million MWh. America today has less than 20 thousand MWh of grid scale battery storage, which is next to nothing.
Grid scale batteries today cost around $700,000 a MWh. For 250 million MWh we get an astronomical total cost of $175 trillion dollars just to replace today’s fossil fuel generated electricity needs with wind and solar. Even the fantastically low cost estimates that some people are proposing puts the cost around the total annual GDP of America. Even worse, if we get the electric cars and trucks the Biden Administration is calling for these astronomical numbers could easily double.
https://www.cfact.org/2022/12/15/astronomical-battery-cost-looms-over-renewables/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=astronomical-battery-cost-looms-over-renewables
