Today, my long-awaited paper on energy storage is officially published on the website of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. Here is a link. The paper is 22 pages long according to the template they published plus a few more pages for the Summary and table of contents. They titled it “The Energy Storage Conundrum”.
Most of the points made in the article have been made before on this blog in one form or another. However, there are many additional details in the article that never appear here. I will provide an example of that today and many more similar examples in the coming days.
The main point of the paper is that the grid is powered mainly by intermittent generators such as wind and solar that require complete backup from several sources; and if that source is stored energy, the amount of storage required is truly astounding. When you do the simple math to calculate storage requirements and possible costs, it becomes clear that the entire project is completely impractical and unsustainable. The activists and politicians pushing us towards this new wind/solar/storage system are either intentionally deceiving or completely incompetent.
If you follow the news on this topic on a general level, you may find this conclusion surprising. After all, there are frequent announcements that this or that jurisdiction has contracted to purchase a seemingly large number of batteries for grid-level storage. The report cites data from the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie on announced storage acquisition plans or contracts in all major European countries and cites other reports on plans already underway. published from California and New York in the United States. The title of the April 2022 Wood Mackenzie article on Europe certainly gives the impression that these people are in control of the situation and know what they are doing: “European grid-scale energy storage capacity in Europe. will increase 20-fold by 2031.” Impressive!
But this is one of those topics where you have to look at the actual numbers to judge if the plans make sense. In this situation you need to compare the amount of energy storage required to back up the entire solar/wind grid almost completely (excluding fossil fuels), with the amount of grid-scale energy storage actually get.
Consider the case of Germany, the country that has gone the furthest in the world on the path of “energy transition”. My report presents two different calculations of energy storage requirements for Germany in a world with wind/solar grids and no fossil fuels allowed (both calculations have been mentioned previously on this blog). One of the calculations by a man named Roger Andrews, meet the requirements of about 25,000 GWh; and the other, by two authors named Ruhnau and Qvist, reaching a higher figure of 56,000 GWh. Both use similar but not identical methods and slightly different assumptions. It is clear that there is a great deal of uncertainty regarding the actual claim; but the two calculations cited give a reasonable range for the extent of the problem.
To give you an idea of how much energy storage 25,000 (or 56,000) GWh is, here is a rendering (also from My Report) of a grid-scale battery storage facility under construction in Queensland, Australia by Vena Energy. The facility in the render is intended to provide 150 MWh of storage.
Remember that 150 MWh is only 0.15 of one GWh. In other words, about 167,000 of these facilities would be needed to provide 25,000 GWh of storage, and about 373,000 of them to reach 56,000 GWh in the larger estimate.
And against these projections of storage requirements in the tens of thousands of GWh, what is Germany’s plan as presented in this “20-fold expansion” by 2031? From my report:
In the case of Germany, Wood Mackenzie claims that the planned energy storage capacity for 2031, after a 20-fold expansion, is 8.81GWh.
Instead of tens of thousands of GWh, it’s a single digit. How does that grow as a percentage of the expected requests?:
In other words, the amount of energy reserves Germany is planning for 2031 is between 0.016% and 0.036% of actual demand. This should not be taken as a serious attempt to create a system that would work.
The story is the same in the other jurisdictions covered in the Report. And remember, these are jurisdictions that see themselves as pioneers and pioneers in the transition to renewable energy. For example, New York, with an estimated storage requirement for a predominantly renewable grid of 10,000-15,000 GWh, reported by trade magazine Utility Dive to be “moving forward” with plans to purchase about 6 GW of on-grid storage (perhaps that translates to about 24 GWh). That would be about 0.2% of what is needed. Unless, of course, New York is simultaneously “moving forward” with its plan to triple demand on the grid by electrifying all cars and heating in homes; in that case 24 GWh would fall below 0.1% of the storage requirement.
California? Citation report another post from Utility Dive states that the California Public Utilities Commission has ordered the state’s electricity suppliers to collectively purchase by 2026 approximately 10.5 GW (or 42.0 GWh) of lithium-ion batteries for grid-scale storage electricity:
The additional 10.5 GW of lithium-ion storage, up to a maximum of about 42 GWh, would bring California to about 0.17% of the energy storage it needs to fully back up a wind/power generation system. Sun.
However, you may think that this situation is bad, it is worse. Am I the only one who has ever done these simple calculations? I’ve certainly never seen them anywhere else.
I would be happy to be proven wrong about any and all of this. All I’m saying is that the proponents of this magical fantasy energy future owe it to the rest of us to build an effective demonstration project before forcing us all to adopt the plan. their utopia at a hefty price, only to find out that it wouldn’t work and couldn’t work.
Here’s what you need to know: not only are there no active demonstration projects anywhere in the world for wind/solar/storage energy systems, but but none are under construction and not even suggested. Instead, the idea of your advocates is that your entire state or country will become the test bed for their dreams.
For the full article, click here.
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