More focus on the impossible costs of an all-wind/solar/battery energy system – Raised by that?
Reposted from MANHATTAN CONTRARIAN/ Francis Menton
It is clear that, if we are going to try to transition to a “zero” carbon energy system based entirely on wind, solar and batteries, there is a need to seriously focus on the feasibility and cost of a system system. The particular part of such a potential system that deserves the most attention is its energy storage method, its cost, and indeed its feasibility. That part needs attention because, as wind and solar increase the share of electricity generation above 50% of the total, storage is increasingly becoming the dominant driver of total costs. Furthermore, there is no obvious way to define a fixed amount of storage sufficient to make such a system reliable enough to power the modern economy without adequate redundancy from sources are subject to change. This should also be obvious to anyone thinking about the problem for any length of time.
However, as recently as a couple of weeks ago, it seemed as if the entire Western world was racing towards “net zero” based on wind and sun without anyone anywhere coming up with speculation. think really about the amount of storage required, let alone its cost, and let alone whether any Fixed storage capacity can fully guarantee complete reliability. A retired independent man named Roger Andrews did some calculations in 2018 for test cases in California and Germany, the results showed that at least 30 days of storage is needed for a full backup. wind/solar power system kit. Andrews’ work shows that storage costs just enough to match actual solar/wind disruption models for 2017 will likely cause a multiplier in electricity costs between a factor of 14 and 22. But Andrews didn’t even understand. consider the amount of storage that may be needed in the worst case of a prolonged winter wind or a drought.
And then Andrews died suddenly in early 2019, and no one immediately took over where he left off.
But then a few weeks ago, I found out at Watts Up With That some new work by a man named Ken Gregory (again, a retired, independent guy – funny, isn’t it?) who created a spreadsheet for the whole of America again showing that about 30 days of storage is needed for backups whole wind/solar energy system. (The cost of storage, assuming all energy use is electrified: about $400 trillion.)
And now, several others are joining the action. And not too soon. A man named Roger Caiazza has a blog called New York’s Pragmatic Environmentalist. Caiazza, as you might have guessed by now, is another independent retired guy. Over the past few months, he has mainly focused on the energy transition that is believed to be taking place here in New York State, as a result of something called Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act of 2019 (Climate Act). The Climate Act has created a mess of bureaucracies, and by the end of 2021 those bureaucracies have uttered something they call “Scenario Plan”, shows how New York will go from its current energy system to the nirvana of electrification with “net” emissions no later than 2050.
The Scoping Plan is a huge document (about 330 pages plus more than 500 pages of other addendums) of spectacular incompetence. The basic approach, summarized by me in this post December 29, 2021, Would the appointed “expert” officials working for the State, who themselves had no realistic idea of how to achieve “net zero” from a technical perspective, would solve that problem by pointing need to order people to reach their “net zero” goal by a certain date. Then perhaps some engineer will magically appear to work out the details. The thousands of people who put this together don’t seem to consider proof of cost or feasibility any part of their job. As for the critical issue of energy storage to achieve “real nothing” goals, the Plan defines scope, in almost 1000 pages of thickness, never even to the point of recognizing that the MWH (as opposed to with MW) is the key unit that must be considered to assess cost and feasibility issues.
Over the past several weeks, Caiazza has posted post after article ripping off the Climate Act and the “Scenario Plan,” piece by piece. But today, I want to focus on a post from January 24 titled “Scale Plan Reliability Feasibility – Reproducible Changeability.” This post looks at the impacts of relying solely on wind and solar power, especially in terms of the amount of storage that would be needed with such a system and no fossil fuel redundancy left. , to achieve the required system reliability.
Instead of creating a spreadsheet for annual wind and solar, the way Andrews or Gregory would, Caiazza takes a different approach, simply looking at the worst-case scenario. (For this purpose, Caiazza painted a January 20 work from a man named David Wojick at PA Pundits International.). The beauty of worst-case thinking is that the math becomes so simple you can do it in your head.
So here is the scenario reviewed by Caiazza. Your duty as the State is to provide a continuous supply of 1000 MW of electricity with complete reliability, but with only wind and solar power to power generation. How much creation space do you need, and how much storage? And how much does this cost? (New York’s average current usage is around 18,000 MW, and by the time everything is electrified it will be at least 60,000 MW, so we can multiply everything by 60 at the end to see the cost impact. charges for New York State.)
First what is the assumed worst case? To keep the math simple, Caiazza hypothesizes a solar/storage-only system and an overcast period of five winter days, followed by two sunny days to recharge before the wave The next worst 5-day drought.
The required battery capacity is very simple. Five days at 24 hours a day is 120 hours. Provides a stable 1,000 MW, equivalent to 120,000 MWh of storage. We had 16 hours of overnight storage, so now we need an additional 104 hours, which means 104,000 MWh of additional storage.
But 120,000 MWH of storage assumes you charge the batteries up to 100% and discharge them to 0%. Real-world batteries are supposed to only charge between 20% and 80% for best performance.
Standard practice is 80% to 20% activity. In that case, the available memory is only 60% of the nameplate capacity. This turns the dark days of 120,000 MWh into a claim of 200,000 MWh.
I could throw in that solar panels aren’t producing at full capacity for anything close to 8 hours on even the sunniest winter day, but who’s to blame?
Now, let’s say that in this worst case scenario, we only have two days to charge since the last 5 day drought:
Two days gave us 16 hours of charge time for the required 120,000 MWh, which requires a massive 7,500 MW of generating capacity. We already have 3,000 MW of generating capacity, but that capacity is being used to power all-day sunshine. It is not available to help recharge the battery for the dark days. Turns out we need a massive 10,500 MW . of solar power generation capacity.
That’s right, not only do you need 200,000 MWH of storage, but you also need 10 times the “capacity” of the 1000 MW solar panels that you’re trying to provide on a solid basis, just to solve solve this problem. worst case scenario to get a 1000 MW company through a bad winter month.
For storage costs, Caiazza takes what he calls a standard EIA figure of $250/MWH for the battery. At this price, 200,000 MWH would cost $50 billion. Then there is the cost of solar panels. Here, Caiazza has a standard EIA figure of $1.3 million/MW. For the 10,500 MW capacity case, that means $13.7 billion. Add $50 billion plus $13.7 billion and you get $63.7 billion.
And that is the case with a capacity of 1000 MW. Remember, a fully electrified New York State would need the company 60,000 MW. So multiply $63.7 billion by 60, and you get $3.822 trillion. By comparison, New York State’s annual GDP is about $1.75 trillion.
Caiazza points out that the state’s Scoring Plan puts the required storage costs for a new wind/solar/battery system at between $288.6 and $310.5 billion. These numbers are about 10 times lower than we just calculated. But Caiazza tries to find in the Plan the range of assumptions under which these numbers have been calculated, and he cannot find it. I can’t either. Maybe some readers can understand.
The reader can see that Caiazza’s $3.8 trillion figure for New York State seems very small compared to the figure calculated by Gregory. Gregory received about $400 trillion for the entire United States. New York represents about 7% of the US economy, which means storage costs for New York would be closer to $30 trillion than $4 trillion. The difference is that Caiazza is calculating the cost of getting through a “worst-case” week in winter, while Gregory is looking at the cost of trying to get through an entire year where energy needs to be stored since summer to get through. through the winter.
One last point. Suppose that, based on even several decades of meteorological data, you determine that this winter’s five-day drought is the real worst-case scenario, and you come up with a system on that basis. OK, now what happens when a year you have a six-day drought? Hypothetically, your fossil fuel backup has been dismantled and is no longer available. Does all the power then just turn off on that Friday? Remember, this is the death of winter. Everyone’s going to freeze to death. So would you spare fossil fuels for a single day that might only happen once every few decades? If so, how much fossil fuel reserves do you need to keep? Think about that for a second. The answer is, all. In a 60,000 MW corporate power requirement scenario for New York State, you would need 60,000 MW of available fossil fuel capacity to cover the day when the battery dies. Dozens of large power plants, fully maintained and fueled at all times, are likely to be switched on for this one day of emergency, perhaps every twenty years.
Or you can avoid it by building more solar panels and more batteries to get through a six-day drought. But what happens when you have a seven-day drought?
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