Most of the comments at this site tend to have views that are consistent with my own. But sometimes a post will attract comments from people with very different views. It happened on a post earlier this week titled “Two more contributions to the inability to electrify everything using only wind, solar and batteries.”
That post and the post immediately before it (“Calculate the full cost of electrifying everything using only wind, solar and batteries”) both focus on a specific problem inherent in the project to replace dispersable carbon-based energy sources (coal, oil, natural gas) with intermittent “renewable energy” ( solar wind). The problem is, as intermittent renewables provide a larger percentage of electricity generation and as dispersable fossil fuels are phased out, the need for extremely expensive energy storage is growing. to provide electricity at times when renewable energy is running smoothly. Two articles linked to detailed studies were written by four different authors, each of whom provided a detailed description of their methodology. Two of the four authors even provide spreadsheets so that a reader who believes the author’s assumptions are wrong can change those assumptions and come up with a new cost estimate from the changed assumptions. change.
The aim of all these studies is when renewables dominate the power generation mix, and especially when their generation rates rise above 50% and continue towards 100%, and project As fossil fuel rooms are phased out, the costs required for storage become far-fetched and the cost of the entire system becomes dominant. Therefore, any meaningful proposal to replace fossil fuel production with renewable energy grapples with this problem.
So what is the solution that the opposing commenters offer to the growing need for expensive storage? They don’t offer any at all. Instead, they seem to think that the whole problem can be eliminated or ignored.
The number of dissident commenters was three and posted under the pseudonyms “Johnathan Galt,” “GKam,” and “Reneawbleguy.” Galt and GKam each posted only one comment, but “Reneawbleguy” posted more than forty.
The gist of all these remarks really comes down to the same point, which is that renewables are rapidly becoming cheaper than fossil fuels to generate electricity, if they aren’t already, and thus Fossil fuels are a dying industry. Interspersed with this point is a lot of sarcastic and accusatory language, essentially asserting that anyone who might disagree about the relative costs of renewable energy is necessarily ignorant and political motives. (eg GKam: “More meaningless science from this political hacking group. . . . Give it up. You’ve already lost. ”). Meanwhile, all three fail to solve the storage problem inherent in generation expansion from renewables.
Here is a “renewable” look at the relative costs of fossil fuel-based electricity generation compared to renewables:
Save energy costs. RE will be cheaper that FF business as usual. 10.43 cents per kw-hour FF 7.81 cents per kw-hour RE. Dollars in our pocket is a clear distinction in favor of RE. The difference is clear.
Save money cost per person.
No sources are cited, but I agree that approximations of these numbers can be found in several studies of the relative costs of renewables compared to fossil fuels. But the studies that get to these numbers do so by ignoring the whole storage problem altogether.
Similarly, from Galt:
[T]he just considers the consumer as, was, and always will be, “how much will it cost me?” That is neatly quantified in Lazard’s excellent publication offering the LCOE.
As I have pointed out on this blog many times, the Lazard numbers for “LCOE” (Cost of Balanced Energy) specifically eliminate any inherent costs for required storage. Since storage costs are the dominant cost of a fully renewable system, the LCOE is opposed to a “neat quantification” of comparative power generation costs and quickly becomes completely misleading as the share ratio increases. percent generated from renewables increased in excess of 50%.
GKam is even less complicated, simply based on his personal experience with a home that gets its electricity from rooftop solar panels:
My entire household and even electric cars are powered by our rooftop PV system, as “Galt” can tell you, and it gives us free electricity after three five.
GKam doesn’t tell us about how he gets his electricity at night, or on overcast days in winter, or whether he bought enough batteries to store electricity from the summer to use during those long winter nights. or not. If he lives in the United States, it is almost certain that he relies on his local electricity grid – in other words, fossil fuel backup, perhaps some thrown nuclear – for power. amount during that time.
Of the three dissenting commentators, the only one addressing the storage issue was Galt. He asserts with great confidence that new battery technologies coming soon will make the storage problem go away:
At least two separate technologies, Ambri and Form Energy, will almost certainly have their first large plants up and running within the next five years. Both use common materials (antimony and calcium, iron), both are safe for the environment. Ambri’s batteries are 100% recyclable and could theoretically last more than 100 years. Form Energy’s product is also 100% recyclable, costs only 20% of Lithium Ion, and although its lifespan is not advertised, it has the potential for a similar lifetime (simply a “reversible rust”).
So the proposal is that a total government-mandated transformation of our entire economy’s energy system should depend on one or the other of two unproven or unproven technologies. At scale, it may or may not work, and cost projections can be heavily biased. Galt doesn’t do any actual numerical calculations. But at a cost of “20% more than Lithium ion”, the storage systems he is talking about can still show a cost of around $100 trillion in Ken Gregory’s spreadsheet, 5 times the current GDP of USA. Shouldn’t this be acknowledged as an issue? And how can you advocate using Lazard’s “LCOE” numbers for the relative cost of energy sources when those calculations ignore a $100 trillion entry that applies to wind and solar but not fossil fuels?
So I say to these three commenters: it’s time to up your game. Don’t just make unsupported claims that wind and sun are cheaper. Give us a spreadsheet with a numerical demonstration of how much storage a full US wind/solar/storage system would need, what technology would be used to provide it. level and cost. Without that, you’re just dealing in fantasy.
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