The disastrous economics of trying to power an electric grid with 100% intermittent “renewables”
By
CFACT Ed
|
March 30th, 2024
BY FRANCIS MENTON:
The effort to increase the percentage of electricity generated by intermittent renewable sources like wind and solar inevitably brings about large increases in the actual price of electricity that must be paid by consumers. The price increases grow and accelerate as the percentage of electricity generated from the intermittent renewables increases toward 100 percent. These statements may seem counterintuitive, given that the cost of fuel for wind and solar generation is zero. However, simple modeling shows the reason for the seemingly counterintuitive outcome: the need for large and increasing amounts of costly backup and storage – things that are not needed at all in conventional fossil-fuel-based systems. And it is not only from modeling that we know that such cost increases would be inevitable. We also have actual and growing experience from those few jurisdictions that have attempted to generate more and more of their electricity from these renewables. This empirical experience proves the truth of the rising consumer price proposition.
In those jurisdictions that have succeeded in getting generation from renewables up to as high as about 30% of their total electricity supply, the result has been an approximate tripling in the price of electricity for their consumers. The few (basically experimental) jurisdictions that have gotten generation from renewables even higher than that have had even greater cost increases for relatively minor increases in generation from renewables. As the percentage of electricity coming from renewables increases, the consumer price increases accelerate.
No jurisdiction – even an experimental one – has yet succeeded in getting the percentage of its electricity generated from the intermittent renewables up much past 50% on an annualized basis. To accomplish the feat of getting beyond 50% and closer to 100%, the grid operator must cease relying on fossil fuel backup power for times of dark and calm and move instead to some form of storage, most likely very large batteries. The cost of such batteries sufficient to power a jurisdiction of millions of people is enormous and quickly comes to be the dominant cost of the system. Relatively simple calculations of the cost of batteries sufficient to get through a year for a modern industrialized area show that this cost would imply an increase in the price of electricity by a factor of some 15 or 20, or perhaps even more.
The burden of such increasing prices for electricity would fall most heavily on poor and low-income people.
https://www.cfact.org/2024/03/30/the-disastrous-economics-of-trying-to-power-an-electric-grid-with-100-intermittent-renewables/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-disastrous-economics-of-trying-to-power-an-electric-grid-with-100-intermittent-renewables&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-disastrous-economics-of-trying-to-power-an-electric-grid-with-100-intermittent-renewables
