![]() ![]() If prices get high enough supply will expand, but prices are already ridiculously, unfeasibly high. Not enough lithium and cobalt and other rare minerals are being mined at the moment. Wind farms cost about $1.5 million per MW so the cost of battery storage would be astronomical: 80 times greater than the cost of the wind farm! A major additional constraint would be that such quantities of batteries are simply not available. For every MW of wind or solar power in California, $120 million would need to be spent on storage. The current cost of battery storage is about US$600,000 per MWh. Perhaps this could be provided in the form of batteries? Germany could probably manage with 150 MWh per MW. Relatively simple calculations show that that California would need over 200 megawatt-hours (MWh) of storage per installed MW of wind and solar power. Reasonable cost, large scale energy storage, sufficient to keep the lights on for several days at a minimum, would solve the problem.įirst we need to consider the scale of the issue. ![]() Only one thing can save the day for the renewables plan. Building even more renewables capacity will not help: even ten or 100 times the nominally-necessary “capacity” could never do the job on a cold, windless evening. Power prices will soar, making more or less everything more expensive, and there will be frequent blackouts. Neighbouring regions will be unable to provide the backup power needed emissions from open cycle gas turbines (or new coal powerplants, as in the case of Germany at the moment) will become unacceptable more existing base load stations will be forced to shut down by surges in renewables more and more wind and solar power will have to be expensively dumped when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. Under net-zero plans, all nations will need to generate many times more electricity than they now can, as the large majority of our energy use today is delivered by burning fossil fuels directly. The increasingly troubled French nuclear fleet, which formerly had plenty of spare energy on tap, for a long time helped to make renewables plans look practical across Western Europe.īut this situation is not sustainable in the long term. Switching to high-emissions machinery as part of an effort to reduce emissions is, frankly, madness!Ĭertain countries are helped because their power systems are supported by major inter-connectors to adjacent regions that have surplus power available. ![]() But open-cycle gas turbines burn about twice as much gas as combined cycle gas turbines. In fact it's already common to see efficient combined-cycle gas turbines replaced by open-cycle ones because they can be throttled up and down easily to back up the rapidly changing output of wind and solar farms. As a result operating and maintenance costs have increased and many stations have had to be shut down. This brings with it a new operating regime where stations that were designed to operate continuously have to follow unpredictable fluctuations in wind and solar power. The reality is that many of them have kept the lights on only by using existing fossil fired stations as backup for periods of low wind and sun. The governments of countries with a considerable amount of wind and solar generation have developed an expectation that they can simply continue to build more until net zero is achieved. “Capacity” being a largely meaningless figure for a wind or solar plant, about 3000 megawatts (MW) of wind and solar capacity is needed to replace a 1000 MW conventional power station in terms of energy over time: and in fact, as we shall see, the conventional power station or something very like it will still be needed frequently once the wind and solar are online. Solar power disappears completely every night and drops by 50 per cent or more during cloudy days. In the real world a wind farm’s output often drops below 10 per cent of its rated “capacity” for days at a time. These plans have a single, fatal flaw: they are reliant on the pipe-dream that there is some affordable way to store surplus electricity at scale. ![]() This belief has led the US and British governments, among others, to promote and heavily subsidise wind and solar. It's widely believed that wind and solar power can achieve this. The US and UK both say they will deliver by 2050. Many governments in the Western world have committed to “net zero” emissions of carbon in the near future. ![]()
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