Posted on by Californiacontrarian

The Fantasy of Battery Storage

One of the things that is absolutely necessary for this “fossil fuel is bad” craze to succeed is successful battery storage. Not cognizant of what that means, or what the plan is … could that be because there does not seem to be a plan?

Solar power can only provide electricity when the sun is shining, and this presents a real problem during the winter when the the days are shorter. Or similarly, in the northern latitudes on rainy or cloudy days in the summer. Wind power can only provide electricity when the wind is blowing. Sure the wind does blow most of the time in certain areas, but what about in those areas that have little or no wind on most days? 

As I sit writing this piece, I am looking outside. It is perfectly calm without a wisp of wind, and it has been cloudy and overcast all day. Surely those who are promoting the sun and the wind as our sole source of electricity have thought of what will be done on days like this. Obviously, just store the energy that was acquired on prior sunny and windy days until it is needed. And that, my friends, is the crux of the problem … how is that solar/wind power energy going to be stored? 

Note: The electric grid is not a storage device. Electricity on the grid must be consumed in the moment in which it is produced.

Surely those who are promoting the sun and the wind as our sole source of electricity have thought of this storage issue. Err, … maybe not, because at this time, there is no way to store the amount of electricity generated by sun and wind for when we will need it.

An interesting article by John Hinderaker in Energy Policy points out the folly of energy storage. 

“Francis Menton has just published a paper on energy storage. He summarizes his findings at his web site:

The main point of the paper is that an electrical grid powered mostly by intermittent generators like wind and sun requires full backup from some source; and if that source is to be stored energy, the amounts of storage required are truly staggering. When you do the simple arithmetic to calculate the storage requirements and the likely costs, it becomes obvious that the entire project is completely impractical and unaffordable. The activists and politicians pushing us toward this new energy system of wind/solar/storage are either being intentionally deceptive or totally incompetent.”

The amount of energy storage that Germany is planning for 2031 is between 0.016% and 0.036% of what it actually would need. This does not qualify as a serious effort to produce a system that might work.

This absurd situation is duplicated in every other jurisdiction that has purported to mandate wind and solar energy. 

For example, in California, a report from Utility Dive states that the California Public Utilities Commission has ordered the state’s power providers to collectively procure by 2026 some 10.5 GW (or 42.0 GWh) of lithium-ion batteries for grid-scale storage:

The additional 10.5 GW of lithium-ion storage capacity, translating to at most about 42 GWh, would take California all the way to about 0.17% of the energy storage it would need to fully back up a wind/solar generation system.

In conclusion from Hinderaker’s article:

Not only is there no working demonstration project anywhere in the world of the wind/solar/storage energy system, but there is none under construction and none even proposed.

The whole green energy project is a gigantic fraud. A handful of shysters are getting rich, along with some activists and politicians, while the rest of us will be left holding the bag, and holding the bag in the dark! 

1/17/23

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