Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
Advocates of generating electricity mostly with intermittent wind and sun, when challenged on how they would deal with a calm night, are always ready with the obvious answer: energy storage. Just get some batteries, store up excess power from the windy mid-days, discharge as needed, and everything will work out.
Advocates of generating electricity mostly with intermittent wind and sun, when challenged on how they would deal with a calm night, are always ready with the obvious answer: energy storage. Just get some batteries, store up excess power from the windy mid-days, discharge as needed, and everything will work out.
Unfortunately, the advocates never acknowledge that the problem of making an electrical grid work 24/7/365 with mostly wind and solar generation is much more difficult than just storing power from the day to discharge that night. Both wind and sun are subject to regular “droughts,” just like rain. There can be many consecutive days, or even weeks, of combined low wind and sun; let alone the entire winter has a lack of sun, and both summer and winter have less wind than spring and fall. Calculating how much energy storage will suffice to get through even a year of average wind/sun variability is a straightforward exercise, yielding an answer of as much as 1000 hours of average consumption. Meanwhile, naive politicians (those in New York being Exhibit A) regularly get duped into buying a few hours or tens of hours worth of batteries for grid backup, spending billions of dollars on amounts of storage that will be almost useless for backing up a primarily wind/sun grid.
I first wrote about this subject way back in 2018, and have had many follow-up pieces since. The conclusion of my pieces has been that to obtain sufficient battery storage to back up a primarily wind/sun grid using current lithium-ion battery technology, and even assuming best case future cost reductions and economies of scale, would cost the full GDP and more of any jurisdiction that makes the effort.
Well, who says you can only use lithium-ion technology? The massive Biden-era green energy handout statutes (e.g., the “Inflation Reduction Act”), together with green energy enthusiasm generally, have brought forth a gusher of entrepreneurialism looking for new, better and cheaper energy storage systems. Recent comments on some of my posts, as well as those of daughter Jane over at @janementonnyc on Instagram, have advocated for two new technologies of energy storage as the solution to the intermittency problem. Those two are flywheel batteries, and iron-air batteries. Could either of those really work?
As background to discussion of those two specifically, I suggest thinking about the model of the storage of drinking water. New York City stores water in a network of reservoirs located in upstate New York. The City’s water consumption is approximately 1 billion gallons per day. The storage capacity of the reservoirs is approximately 550 billion gallons, that is, approximately 550 days, or more than a year and a half of consumption. The amount stored in the reservoirs fluctuates over the course of a year, and generally drops over the summer and into the fall, but it rarely gets below about 70% of capacity, or about 380 billion gallons. And in years with serious droughts, the storage can fall below 50% of capacity, and even down to 40% of capacity. A storage level of under 40% of capacity has only happened once in my lifetime, which was about 60 years ago. In other words, most of the storage capacity is there to guard against a worst-case drought, and much of the water remains in storage for decades on end to guard against that event. Fortunately, a simple reservoir has the capability to do that.
An electrical grid without full dispatchable backup needs the same kind of storage capability. The fact that a group of generators can produce the same number of MWhs of energy in a year as the average amount demanded means little unless the energy can be matched minute by minute to the demand. To meet that criterion, a storage system must be able to store the energy from summer to winter, or from spring one year all the way to spring the next year. Preferably, there should be an ample balance stored for the long term to guard against a worst-case wind/sun drought that may occur only once a decade.
By the way, it is by no means clear that lithium-ion batteries have this level of capability. But for today, let’s consider the technologies advocated by our commenters, flywheel and iron-air.
Flywheel batteries. Flywheel batteries have lots of advantages. For example, they can discharge a very high percentage of the energy originally stored in them (90-95%), and can be charged and discharged potentially thousands or even tens of thousands of times without seriously degrading. Moreover, they can ramp up and down quickly to replace generation from intermittent sources; and they have spinning inertia, which wind and solar generators do not, and which is badly needed for grid stability.
But unfortunately flywheel batteries have very high rates of what is called “self-discharge,” that is, dissipation of the stored power over time. According to this source (something called Permanent Energy), many flywheel batteries lose as much as 12.5% per hour, and even the best ones lose about 5% per day. Other sources give me similar answers. In other words, energy stored in a flywheel battery will be long gone a month later, even if never called on. Flywheel batteries may have many uses, but for purposes of backing up the grid against any serious wind/sun drought, they are worthless. Oh, and they are expensive — currently costing in the range of $400/kWh, which is more even than lithium-ion batteries and translates to many trillions of dollars to buy amounts useful for full grid backup.
Iron-air batteries. This is a type of battery that uses only the simplest and most common of materials — iron and air. The process of storing and discharging energy takes place by repeatedly rusting and unrusting the iron. It turns out that you can store a lot of energy that way. It’s not subject to exploding or catching fire. And it’s cheap: proponents claim that they will be able to achieve a price of $20/kWh, which is a small fraction of the current price of lithium-ion batteries (~$300/kWh). So what could possibly be the problem?
Again, self-discharge is a killer. Current iron-air batteries lose about 2-5% of their stored charge per day. At that rate, all the stored charge will be gone in two months, if not one. Maybe the rate could be improved, but it would need to improve by multiple orders of magnitude to make these batteries even a little useful for large-scale grid backup against worst-case droughts.
And then there are a few other problems. Iron-air batteries can only return about 50% of the energy stored; the rest is lost. And they can only discharge about 1% of the stored energy per hour. That means that they are incapable of ramping up and down quickly to back up the intermittent wind and sun.
Now I’m not at all saying that these two sorts of batteries cannot be useful in certain applications. For example, flywheel batteries appear to be very useful to supplement diesel engines to operate heavy cranes. The cranes go for long periods at low energy, and then have a big surge in power demand when they suddenly lift a heavy load. Pairing a flywheel battery with the diesel engine can cut the size of the needed engine by as much as half.
But why anybody, let alone our commenters, thinks that these sorts of batteries are the answer to grid backup for wind/sun generation, I do not know. Maybe some day. Meanwhile, keep working on it. As I have said before, if someone figures out a battery technology that has the needed capability and is also cost-effective to make a grid work with wind/solar generation, I will be the first to applaud.
Battery technology, especially for electric vehicles (EVs), is a key arena in U.S.-China strategic and economic competition. It highlights differences in industrial policy, supply chain control, innovation approaches, regulatory environments, and resource strategies.
The most familiar races between superpowers are those involving dreaded killer weapons, but today the U.S. and China are engaged in another one involving a centuries-old invention that also improves life: batteries.
One year ago, the Chinese battery giant CATL announced that it had redefined the limits of electric cars by creating a battery that could power a vehicle for 320 miles on a 5-minute charge. And in March, the world’s largest EV maker, China’s BYD Auto, unveiled a car that could also be charged in less time than it takes to fill a traditional car with gasoline.
These Eureka! moments, much heralded by renewable energy champions, make it appear that China has leaped over the Energizer bunny and eclipsed the U.S. in a field Americans have long dominated. Coming on the heels of the billions the Biden administration poured into batteries and other green energy projects, the apparently superior Chinese technology raises questions not just about what the U.S. has to show for its spending, but also about larger concerns regarding America’s ability to compete with its main rival.
“Kamala Harris said the Biden administration spent $1 trillion on green energy, and if we’re now falling short in that area, one has to ask where the money went,” said Daniel Turner, the founder and executive director of Power The Future, a conservative advocacy group for rural energy communities. “None of it seems to have materialized.”
But the situation, as they say in Hollywood, is complicated. While China’s natural resources, economic structure, and ideology give it some advantages when it comes to producing EV batteries, that market is but a star in the sprawling battery universe. On the cutting edge of battery technology, which includes grid storage and backup along with classified programs, several experts told RealClearInvestigations that U.S. technology remains unrivaled.
An RCI look at the evolving landscape of batteries suggests that, given the immense resources the U.S. and China have poured into the technology, it is a good barometer of key advantages and disadvantages each rival superpower possesses. But the limits of that technology also mean it may never provide either side with true superiority.
“Mature Technology”
At its core, a battery still relies on what Alessandro Volta pioneered two centuries ago, when he produced a stream of continuous juice by separating discs of copper and zinc with material soaked in Mediterranean brine.
“It’s a very mature technology in many ways; it’s not a ‘new thing’ because there are no new battery chemistries,” said Mark Mills, the executive director of the National Center for Energy Analytics. “To make lithium batteries, you always need copper and aluminum, and lithium of course, then you need the trace metals needed, depending on the battery type, those could be cobalt, nickel, manganese, or iron oxide.”
The challenge for battery innovators is how to pack as much power as possible into the unit, while also extending the battery’s hours and lifespan and reducing its weight and cost. Breakthroughs are always possible, but incremental advances are the norm, and a big boom could be years away.
“Battery technology is consistently improving, but the process is slow,” said Brent Bennett, an energy expert at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. “We are used to computing power, which scales at 50 percent per year, or software, where advances seem to come every day. Batteries, and energy technologies in general improve at rates of three to five percent per year.”
But there are always new combinations and seemingly endless uses for them. At “The Battery Guy” website, for example, one can scroll pages of offerings under 16 different categories, from dog collars to voting machines, and 13 different “battery types,” from the familiar alkaline to “nickel metal hydride” or “nickel cadmium” and “pure lead.”
Most of these fall into the first of two battery categories, that of “SLI,” or “starting, lighting, and ignition.” But the real high-tech work in modern batteries is in “UPS,” or “uninterrupted power supply,” which is instrumental for data centers, backup power, industrial machinery, cellphone towers, and more, and it is here U.S. technology shines, according to several battery developers.
It is unlikely that batteries alone will ever provide sufficient power to back the grid for long periods of time if conventional sources falter. The world’s largest battery backup system, in Fairbanks, Alaska, is designed to keep the town running for up to seven minutes before backup generators can kick in.
China’s Advantage
All the recent stories about China’s dominance involve EV batteries, several experts noted. The featured players on that field are BYD Auto and Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Limited (CATL), with its “Shenxing Superfast Charging Battery.”
When it comes to making EVs, China enjoys some undeniable advantages. The country possesses greater supplies of the critical ingredients for batteries, and it has also built greater refining capabilities to turn these elements into usable materials. Chinese companies also benefit from much cheaper labor costs.
In addition, the Chinese Communist Party labeled batteries a key component of energy policy more than a decade ago and has featured them in consecutive “Five-Year Plans,” the staple of Communist central planning. In that span, the EV and battery industry there benefited from an estimated $500 billion in state money that provided cheap land, tax breaks, subsidies, and more for battery makers.
The mining and refining that go into making EV batteries come with environmental costs that are of little concern to party leaders in Beijing, who are focused strictly on economic power. Similarly, the country simply tosses unsold products like EVs into fields to rot, potentially causing greater environmental damage.
Finally, there is the black, sulfurous cloud that looms over China’s manufacturing push. China’s EV and battery boom, like much of its industry, relies on coal for much of its power, and the country burns more coal than any nation on earth, accounting for more than half of the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions from that source.
“Right now, China controls the supply chain and it is hugely subsidized,” said H. Sterling Burnett, a policy director at the conservative Heartland Institute. “If you control those markets, have cheap or even slave labor, and don’t care a whit about the people who do the mining and refining, if you have government support and lax standards like that it would be a surprise if you weren’t the leader in the industry.”
Not So Green
Despite China’s mammoth carbon footprint – it is now the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases – stories championing its superiority in renewable energy projects have long been a staple of those pushing green policies to combat what they characterize as the “existential threat” of global warming.
In 2010, prior to one of his many visits to China, California Gov. Gavin Newsom said, “the self-evident fact is that China will clean our clocks in terms of addressing the green economy if we don’t wake up to the opportunities and do the same.” Two years ago, a bipartisan group of mayors praised China’s green initiatives after a visit there, and last year, the New York Times hailed “China’s green triumph.”
Today, the EV batteries that have left many Westerners starry-eyed come with strings. There are U.S. firms that could match China’s steps, several experts told RCI, but they are unlikely to do so for a variety of reasons. These include the fact that batteries absorbing such jolts of juice wear down quickly, the superchargers these batteries require are rare, especially among car owners, and the EV market is faltering in the U.S.
“It’s an impressive feat,” Mills said of the Chinese announcements. “But it’s not unique. There are lots of people who can give you 60-plus percent of that in 20 minutes or less with superchargers, that’s not new. The problem is it is around 20 to 50 times more expensive than [charging] overnight.”
The cost of building an EV-charging infrastructure in the U.S. equal to what exists today for gasoline and diesel vehicles would be $2-$4 trillion, according to a 2024 report by the National Center for Energy Analytics. And that’s just for commonly sold EVs – building a supercharging infrastructure that could juice motorists for more than 300 miles in minutes would cost vastly more, Mills said.
The fact that China may be first in this area is more a reflection of its domestic economy than superior technology, experts said. China’s automotive system is in a more fledgling state than America’s and, lacking the infrastructure to power gas and diesel vehicles, China decided to take an electric route as it builds out. Something similar happened in the cellphone world in the 1990s, where Europe, lacking the continent-wide phone infrastructure of the U.S., used the gadgets much more widely than Americans, said Chris Antoniou, the owner of the EVERLAST brand and “The Battery Expert” who has spent a quarter century in the battery world and crisscrossed China looking at “hundreds” of battery-related businesses.
“I’m not surprised because you have a huge part of our economy backed by oil and gas,” he told RCI. “Plus, the world’s economy is also driven by that, plus the American auto makers slow played the transition. It’s a niche market and the only reason EVs exist is for green people and climate change.”
Bennett, whose PhD thesis was focused on developing large-scale batteries, agreed. “We still have world-class battery technology and technology development,” he said. “The problem is getting from a prototype to a commercial project, and that valley of death has been hard to bridge here. Profitable battery companies require not just good technology but also massive scale.”
Biden Bucks
The billions the Biden administration poured into batteries were intended “to boost the domestic production of advanced batteries and battery materials nationwide.” Yet, much of the money was directed to political allies in the green energy sector – some of whom lacked any experience in the field – while also focusing too heavily on EVs, according to administration critics and many energy experts.
Bennett echoed that view, while Turner said that for too long, climate has “served as a shield,” in which imputed good intentions can mask backscratching and failure.
Still, despite sectors like defense and grid storage where U.S. battery technology excels, one big question remains: Why hasn’t the money showered on green energy projects under Biden shaved the competitive edges China has achieved?
“We did spend oodles of money, and the One Big Beautiful Bill the Republican congressional majority passed last year maintained subsidies for both battery manufacturing and installing battery systems on the grid,” Bennett said. “But the U.S. should not try to force technology to be adopted or scaled in the way that China is doing. We need to give private markets the space and regulatory certainty to develop on their own and stop trying to use taxpayer money to ‘create’ new industries.”
Biden also left office with a regulatory system that made the toll over the bridge to market too high, burdens that do not exist or are easily waived by Communist Party officials in China.
“The regulations here are basically hostile to these sorts of industries,” Mills said.
The U.S. Scene
Just how big the gap between China and the U.S. may be depends, to some extent, on which expert one consults. For example, last month the U.S. Energy Storage Coalition released a report saying that, “for the first time, American factories have the capacity to supply 100% of future U.S. energy storage projects with American-made battery energy storage systems – including advanced power electronics, battery management systems, controls equipment, operational hardware, and specially engineered and fabricated steel enclosures designed for grid-scale facilities.”
The cutting edge for battery companies in the U.S. isn’t EVs. On EverLast’s home page, for example, it lists “cars, trucks, boats, powersports, fleet vehicles and generators” but not EVs.
In at least one area – military applications – Antoniou and others told RCI the United States is far ahead of the world. This has been true for decades, as when, during the buildup for the invasion of Iraq from Kuwait, U.S. Army tanks had cutting-edge batteries that allowed them to keep their place in formation without having to refuel.
Much of the Pentagon’s use of batteries is classified, but they are known to play a role in the drone warfare that has become part of combat in the Ukraine and Iran wars, and batteries are also part of high-tech weapons like the Navy’s “high-energy laser.”
The Defense Department did not respond to a request for comment, but the Trump administration has also poured money into battery supplies and technology, trying to bridge the drone gap between the U.S. and China.
What’s Ahead
In recent years, when the conversation was dominated by fear of catastrophic global warming and NetZero policies to fight it, grid storage batteries were usually seen as repositories for energy produced by renewables such as wind and solar. That juice needs to get from the panels and windmills to the grid, and batteries are the main method of storing and moving that power.
But U.S. industries have multiple visions for grid storage batteries. It is a mistake to see these batteries, the size of shipping containers stuffed with cargoes of supercomputers, as only or chiefly coupled with renewables, according to Aaron Zubaty, founder and chief executive of Eolian, a Silicon Valley energy storage company.
He argues these batteries should also be used to augment existing grids, and Eolian has developed batteries that can store power already produced in non-peak hours and then feed right back to the grid when needed. Since it is cheaper to squeeze the most out of a fading power plant, including coal, than it is to build a new plant, batteries can also prolong the life of those diminishing producers.
Another U.S. company, Form Energy, is utilizing what it calls “iron air battery technology,” which it manufactures in the repurposed former Weirton Steel factory in West Virginia. Essentially, Form is rusting and then un-rusting iron, generating power in the process that it stores in batteries. The company has been able to ramp that up to industrial scale, and last month announced a 12-gigawatt deal with an AI company to help sate the gargantuan energy appetite of its data centers.
“Large scale energy storage is by far the largest sector of the energy storage market, and it can be the primary support for the main power grid,” said the Coalition’s executive director, Noah Roberts. “And there we’re still leading in innovative battery technology.”
Even China’s big advantage in the supply chain could be mitigated, according to energy executives. At last year’s RealClearEnergy Forum, Zubaty said he believes the U.S. could build its own lithium supply chain, and last week the U.S. Geological Survey announced a find of potentially 2.3 million metric tons of lithium, enough to power America’s battery industry for a century or more. Brandon Craig, recently appointed chairman of the mining conglomerate BHP Americas, proposed a kind of NATO alliance between North and South American allies that could capitalize on big lithium deposits in Chile, Australia, and elsewhere.
Expanding battery production outside of the faltering U.S. EV market is also a plus, Roberts said. Currently, the battery industry is concentrated in Appalachia – where most of the recent lithium discovery sits – the Midwest, and the Southwest, but the Coalition estimates close to $100 billion in private investment in battery development and production by 2030, which in turn could produce 350,000 jobs.
In other words, any perceived gap in battery technology between the U.S. and China is mostly one of priorities rather than know-how. The most important issue with batteries is always power generated, and it is the tradeoffs between performance and price that limit designers. It’s the difference in regulatory attitude and framework, meanwhile, that warps production.
“The question is the same for every technology: Why does it seem like none of the things we buy were made here even though we invented them?” Mills said.
This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.
“… A possibility to discuss is lowering the 50kWh threshold to 15kWh. …”
Australia’s $2.3 billion green energy program is funding oversized batteries and blowing out in cost
Published: December 8, 2025 12.07pm AEDT Rohan Best Senior Lecturer, Department of Economics, Macquarie University
…
There has been a massive uptake. The Clean Energy Regulator, which administers the program, told The Conversation that around 146,000 batteries have been installed in just five months.
But digging into the data reveals some major concerns about the program – many of which I previously anticipated. The average size of the batteries installed under the program is roughly double what a regular household requires to meet its energy needs. And that has resulted in a major cost blowout.
…
In September, when the Clean Energy Regulator revealed 50,000 batteries had been installed in just two months, Minister for Climate Change and Energy Chris Bowen said:
This program is working in the suburbs, in the regions and in our cities. Australians are proving the naysayers and climate change deniers wrong – they want to be part of the clean energy future.
The average system size of battery installation is more than 22 kilowatt-hours, which can cost around A$18,000. The most common system size installation is roughly 19kWh.
…
Currently, batteries above 100kWh are ineligible, and batteries above 50kWh only get a discount with respect to the first 50kWh. A possibility to discuss is lowering the 50kWh threshold to 15kWh.
I find Rohan’s apparent implicit use of average energy requirements interesting.
In subtropical Queensland, 15Kwh of battery capacity would be more than enough for our mild winters, and a fair chunk of Fall and Spring. But in Summer pretty much every day where I live is in the low to mid 80s with high humidity. Our 6Kw of home air conditioning hasn’t been switched off since mid November.
The reverse is true in Australia’s south, where lots of home heating is required to drive back the cold and damp of our southern winters. But even in Summer, southern cities can experience dramatic heatwaves in Summer, along with the occasional cold Summer day when home heating is required.
My point is Rohan is wrong about 10KWh 15KWh of battery capacity being enough. For a battery to be any use, it has to be able to handle at least expected seasonal peaks in demand, not just average demand.
I’ve seen University academics use average when they should be using peak before, with disastrous consequences.
There was a string of embarrassing public software disasters in the early 90s, when banks and other major institutions first started going online with automated telephone and dial up services. The disaster was caused by academic consultants called in to assist using average demand to calculate system capacity requirements rather than peak demand. Despite objections from senior programmers, the average demand narrative consistently prevailed, perhaps because it produced lower cost estimates.
The result was a string of launch day failures of high profile software projects, until companies learned through bitter experience to use peak demand to estimate hardware and software capacity requirements.
If Rohan’s apparent use of average capacity is typical, if that same academic mistake of using average demand rather than peak demand for capacity calculations has infiltrated Australia’s grid planning process, Australia is in for one hell of a ride.
Last week an editorial in our small town newspaper was brought to my attention. It was entitled “Energy opportunities ignored, rate payer will pay more” and is most likely behind a paywall. It was, simply put, an awful editorial. It promoted all manner of unsupportable notions about energy generation and delivery. Just to give you a flavor of the editorial, I will quote one short section.
Last week an editorial in our small town newspaper was brought to my attention. It was entitled “Energy opportunities ignored, rate payer will pay more” and is most likely behind a paywall. It was, simply put, an awful editorial. It promoted all manner of unsupportable notions about energy generation and delivery. Just to give you a flavor of the editorial, I will quote one short section.
“Most cities could get a majority of their power from solar and battery storage at a price similar to new gas plants. The costs of solar and batteries are coming down fast.”
No data backs up any of these or similar claims. I mentioned in response that the authors missed that our utility bills have risen 46% in two years already, much of which is rising gas usage and cost related to balancing wind/solar, and also to market purchases of power.
The piece focusses most of its energy, though, attacking the most recent Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) of our local utility for backtracking on promises made years ago to abandon fossil fuels. It urges people to write to our Public Service Commission (PSC) and ask it to emphasize ratepayer cost and public health in its decisions about energy generation. Somehow this will help them abandon fossil fuels or force the utility to do so.
This opinion piece is unremarkably similar to an uncountable number of opinions expressed in the media each day. But my attention was not drawn to the piece itself, but to the writers’ affiliations. Both are members of the Citizen’s Climate Lobby and one additionally to an entity named republicEN.org, which one of the writers of the opinion piece suggests is a “community of conservatives dedicated to free enterprise actions on climate change.”
Free enterprise I am generally all in favor of. However, what has conservative or progressive, or any other political orientation, have to do with energy generation and delivery? As Margaret Thatcher said long ago, “the facts of life are conservative”, and the fact of life that most supports this statement is the very nature of energy. It is determined not at all by human affairs.
Thus, I was drawn into a closer examination of both Citizen’s Climate Lobby and republicEN.
Citizen’s Climate Lobby
This group’s website advertises two main initiatives: 1) Permitting reform, and 2) Nonpartisan Climate Advocacy.
Permitting reform is the idea that besides receiving hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer subsidies, clean energy (wind, solar, batteries) really could use the permitting rails greased for them as well. We can’t do enough for clean energy.
Nonpartisan Climate Advocacy looks like vanilla flavored lobbying – better to label it advocacy of course. The “nonpartisan” label here is false as a person can see by the advisory board members. A few of these, like Dr. Silvia Earle, are minor environmental celebrities. I recall her being a spokesperson for Rolex, but she has founded or is connected to many other environmental advocacy groups as well. Dr. Steven Chu is a Nobel Prize winner. Michael Gerrard is a Director of Climate Change Law and Chair of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. Climate Change Law, of course, provides advisory support for climate litigation and the writing of climate related regulation.
Follow the path to the Earth Institute and what one finds is a long list of members who are, themselves, directors of other institutes, including NASA Goddard. What one learns quickly is how higher education can spend billions of dollars not educating anyone, but providing good paying jobs.
It is a very large web of connections. Pretty powerful ones.
RepublicEN
This group’s webpages devote a lot of space to promoting their “right wing” advocacy – thus the play on the word “Republican” in the group’s URL. Anonymous testimonials speak of the members being Christian or Right-wing, but deeply concerned about climate change, and not science deniers, by the way. One might interpret the pitch crudely as “please join us in advancing progressive goals on climate change, and we will put you in an environment where we promise not to mock or harass you for your other beliefs.”
It turns out that republicEN is not an isolated group or a grass roots organization. It is a project of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University (CCCC). Following the path to this group reveals another of their initiatives is something called Climate Matters. A headline project here is helping TV weathercasters and journalists report local climate change stories. Apparently, surveys done by CCCC have…
“revealed that TV weathercasters are highly trusted sources of information about global warming. They also have unparalleled access to the public, and superior science communication skills.”
Your local weather personality is the Marcus Welby of climate change.
Following a link on this Climate Matters page, takes a person further into one of CCCCs other partners, Climate Central. Here stories are produced for dissemination to local news organizations. There are only two things of particular note.
First, they promise
“…We defer to our partners on most final editorial decisions, but insist upon scientific accuracy and context. If we can’t reach agreement on the science in a story, we agree in advance that we will halt the project.”
If the opinion piece that started this effort is any indication, then accuracy falls short of this stated goal. The opinion piece was full of the usual flapdoodle about clean energy, prices, energy rates, and fossil fuels being horribly out of date as energy sources. OK; the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) says otherwise, though.
Second, in terms of identifying for the public the origin of these stories they say…
“We share bylines with print partners and ask broadcast partners to mention our partnership in their coverage.”
This surely undermines trust between a media resource (print or TV) and its consuming public who have been conditioned to believe that news sources are independent. The general population are rapidly learning not to trust anything coming from the media. Climate Central’s effort in this case is probably hurrying this erosion along.
Conclusion
Two organizations, one espousing its nonpartisanship, and the other promoting itself a “right-wing” or Republican, are revealed as increasingly progressive leftist as one peels away layers of other affiliations and partnerships. We may be the world’s most viewed site about climate change, but we aren’t nearly so organized.
The bigger lesson learned, though? Nullius in Verba.
Fidra Energy, a European battery energy storage system (BESS) platform headquartered in Edinburgh, UK, today announced it has secured up to £445 million of new equity investment from EIG and the National Wealth Fund (the NWF) as it reaches financial close on the UK’s largest Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) project at its Thorpe Marsh site in Doncaster, South Yorkshire.
The new BESS at Thorpe Marsh near Doncaster gives us a good idea of the scale and cost of battery storage:
Fidra Energy, a European battery energy storage system (BESS) platform headquartered in Edinburgh, UK, today announced it has secured up to £445 million of new equity investment from EIG and the National Wealth Fund (the NWF) as it reaches financial close on the UK’s largest Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) project at its Thorpe Marsh site in Doncaster, South Yorkshire.
Construction of Thorpe Marsh is set to begin immediately and, in addition to the investment by EIG and the NWF, will be funded by new loan facilities of £594 million from a club of international lenders1. Thorpe Marsh is the largest standalone BESS project financed globally and the largest BESS financing in Europe.
The 1,400 MW / 3,100MWh project, which is expected to be operational starting in mid-2027, will be the largest battery storage facility in the UK and among the largest in Europe. Once completed, Thorpe Marsh is expected to be three times larger than any other BESS project currently in operation or under construction in the UK and will have the potential to export over 2 million MWh annually, enough to supply about 785,000 homes each year.
Battery storage is essential to the UK energy transition, enabling the integration of renewables into the grid and helping to reduce energy waste, improve grid stability and provide greater network flexibility.
The likes of AEP often talk about the cost of batteries but never factor in all of the associated costs – site construction, infrastructure, grid connections, ancillary electrical equipment and so on.
Thorpe Marsh looks like costing over a billion pounds. The nameplate capacity of 3100 MWh will not all be usable. Allowing for line losses, deterioration of time and the fact that you would never drain the battery completely, 2 MWh would be the most you could sensibly plan for.
To put that into perspective, you would need 500 Thorpe Marsh BESS plants to store 1 TWh, which is not even enough to keep the grid going for one day.
As for a dunkelflaute, the Royal Society reckoned we would 100 TWh of storage to guarantee supplies all year round.
I leave you to do the sums!
BTW – Fidra’s claim that it “will have the potential to export over 2 million MWh annually, enough to supply about 785,000 homes each year”, is grossly dishonest. Batteries cannot supply any power, as it is generated somewhere else first. That electricity still has to be paid for in addition to the costs of the battery storage.
Still I am sure those 785,000 homeowners would be delighted to get the bill for £1274 to pay for Thorpe Marsh!
A couple of weeks ago at the Australian Clean Energy summit, there was a dawning realization that in our rush to diversify the energy grid we are accidentally “diversifying” our cyber security risks too.
A couple of weeks ago at the Australian Clean Energy summit, there was a dawning realization that in our rush to diversify the energy grid we are accidentally “diversifying” our cyber security risks too.
Where, once upon a time, we could double and triple check the barriers around big old coal plants, now we have opened electronic doors to our grid on homes all over Australia. Energy geniuses told us solar panels would be decentralized, but instead, now that Australia has 25,000 megawatts of household solar, we have to add wireless gadgets to control them remotely. And some of these gadgets are coming in from fly-by-night small time operators. If, hypothetically, a foreign power wanted to be mean, or just hold an extra negotiating or blackmail card up its sleeve, we’re making it very easy. If Mr Chin wants something approved, he could say “Nice grid you have there…”
Small scale solar is so big, As Williamson points out, that it supplied 13% of the electricity to the NEM so far this year. And in Western Australia, it has generated 20%. (Boy is the West in trouble?)
On top of this, to deal with the hellfire price spikes at 6pm, the government is subsidizing industrial batteries in homes, wired to the grid, often working in shared “virtual power plants”. Meaning that homes will have large boxes of chemical energy, controlled remotely, and nearly every gadget is made in China.
A combination of state- and regulator-mandated access points with woefully insecure small devices are building an open door for cyber attackers, says Darren Gladman, regulator manager for major equipment supplier SMA Australia.
“My god, small scale. We’ve just introduced an emergency backstop mechanism to turn everything off. If you wanted to make a hacker’s life easy, how could you have made it any easier?” he said during the panel session at ACES.
“The battery rebate, it’s great. However, it’s led to a lot of battery suppliers, a flood of batteries coming in. Some of these companies, when you look at their structure, they might be two or three people in Australia. They’re not thinking about cybersecurity. They’re trying to survive in a really competitive, cutthroat industry.
“And then you’ve got on top of the backstop mechanism. You’ve got virtual power plants. You’ve got this space that lends itself to manipulation so easily, an industry that’s so competitive and so under-resourced that this is seen as a complete luxury, until you’re told that it’s not, and no one’s been told that it’s not.”
The federal battery rebate requires that all home batteries bought with the subsidy be VPP-enabled, and in Western Australia they must be connected to one.
Apparently the rush of insecure gadgets into Australian homes is so bad, that it was referred to as “Digital Asbestos” by David Owen, a Deloitte partner. He wonders who will pay for the replacement of all the inverters if we realize, too late, that they pose an unacceptable risk?
Rachel Williamson reports that everyone in the Australian renewable industry is fine with talking about buying things from China until someone says the word “cybersecurity”. Then suddenly people won’t-mention-the-CCP-word, except to hint anonymously. It’s a strange state of affairs.
In the end, the nation that lied about a pandemic, then launched hostile trade wars when we asked for answers, now potentially has access to many of our homes. It may also have control over explosive batteries and potentially could bring down our grid…
Maybe we should have thought of that ten years ago?
Anthony Albanese was elected in May 2022 and set God-like new emissions targets in to legislation. Ponder the scale of the national achievements of the last three years. All that money, all the wind factories, the solar panels, the batteries, the holes bored in the Snowy Mountains, and this is all we have to show for it?
Anthony Albanese was elected in May 2022 and set God-like new emissions targets in to legislation. Ponder the scale of the national achievements of the last three years. All that money, all the wind factories, the solar panels, the batteries, the holes bored in the Snowy Mountains, and this is all we have to show for it?
This is the graph from the latest Quarterly figures shown on the DCCEEW website (with added notation from me):
Poignantly, Mr Bowen, the Minister for Weather Changing and Energy said — “We’re turning around a decade of denial and delay, by setting serious climate targets in law and delivering the policy certainty to industry to bring down emissions”. Indeed. (Do tell us when you start Chris?)
For some reason none of our expert Climate Models saw any of that coming far enough in advance for us to plan ahead. So we just had to burn a bit more gas and coal. You’d think at this point, the failure of extra wind and solar would be so obvious, the Greens would be begging the Labor Party to build some nuclear plants. But they don’t care about CO2 either.
Beyond that, ponder that even despite weather anomalies, the Labor Government and all the extra “renewables” have not seemingly achieved much in the last three years (or not much in the way of emissions). With all the money spent, wasn’t the line supposed to dip below the trend, not plateau?
The thing is, more than a million people have immigrated to Australia since 2022, and they like emitting carbon dioxide too, and need houses and cars, but no one talks about that. Does the Labor Government care about our national emissions, or is it all just a performance art to justify trips to Davos and Brazil, and enrich their friends and donors?
Anthony Albanese’s 2030 target to reduce emissions is on life support after new data showed Australia’s carbon footprint rose slightly last year driven by a 2.2 per cent increase in the electricity sector.
Figures released by the Climate Change Department show carbon dioxide emissions rose by 0.05 per cent in 2024 to 446.4 million tonnes, equivalent to 27 per cent lower than in 2005.
Despite Labor going all in on renewables as part of its climate change agenda, emissions in the electricity sector increased in 2024 with coal and gas needing to step up due to a lack of water limiting hydro generation in Tasmania.
Australia has currently reduced its emissions by 27% in total since 2005 (mostly due to land use changes, not electricity, but that’s another story). Supposedly, if something supernatural happens, like aliens visit, or a meteor hits Sydney, we’re going to get to a 43% reduction by 2030.
Otherwise to have even the faintest ethereal chance we’d need to increase “renewable-unreliables” from the current 40% up to 82% and 2030 is only five years away? Everyone knows it’s impossible, and yet the crazy bus keeps going?
Even the believers like Bruce Mountain are saying he did not think there was a chance… yet Mr Bowen is still emphatic that “we’re on track”. (Like we live in a different decade of denial now?)
We’re so “on track”, that 75% of the projects the Minister is expecting are not taking off:
Only a quarter of the large-scale renewable energy generation required to hit Labor’s 2030 target in the first three months of 2025 progressed to a firm capital commitment, new data showed this week, sparking a warning that the pace of investment must quickly accelerate to hit the end of decade goal.
At this point in our breakneck transition, wind-factories and solar panels should be going in all over the country. But we just heard that the price of high voltage transmission towers was going to cost up to 55% more than expected, and the AEMO was throwing their previous plans to the wind. Now, we’re all supposed to subsidize each other to buy home batteries, EVs, and solar panels. What do we call that — a pyramid scheme?
Massachusetts just passed a law requiring the big utilities to buy a whopping 1,500 MW of batteries by this July. It should cost several billion dollars requiring immediate rate increases so it will be getting lots of attention. Net zero storage finally hitting the fan.
Massachusetts just passed a law requiring the big utilities to buy a whopping 1,500 MW of batteries by this July. It should cost several billion dollars requiring immediate rate increases so it will be getting lots of attention. Net zero storage finally hitting the fan.
The total battery buy is an incredible 5,000 MW with most of that bought in the next few years so the rate increases will keep coming. The law is a study in vagueness so there will be a lot of confusion along the way.
The complex issues involved have been nicely outlined in two articles by Laurie Belsito at the Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance. The first, written before the Bill passed, is titled “Proposed Battery Law Costs Billions and Does Nothing”. See it here:
This article focuses on the cost of the entire 5,000 MW, saying this:
“The number of batteries is somewhat unclear. The Bill specifies that 5,000 Megawatts (MW) of batteries be bought but this is the discharge capacity, that is how fast the batteries can be emptied. The storage capacity is what counts and that is measured in Megawatt-hours (MWh). Specifying MW is like buying juice based on how fast it pours not how much the bottle holds.
The Bill does include a range of storage capacities which bounds the cost somewhat. Most of the batteries are what is called mid-duration which means they can provide full discharge for from four to 10 hours. Almost all grid scale battery systems these days are four-hour duration so for simplicity we will start by assuming the whole 5,000 MW buy is four-hour batteries.
This gives 20,000 MWh of storage. Battery systems today run around $500,000 per MWh. That gives a total cost of $10,000,000,000 or ten billion dollars which equals roughly 17% of the current state budget. If 10-hour batteries are purchased the cost jumps to $25,000,000,000 or twenty-five billion dollars. The Bill actually calls for a good bit of longer duration batteries as well which makes the cost even higher.”
Ten billion, twenty-five billion, maybe more who knows? That is seriously vague, and I doubt the Legislators who voted for this madness had any idea of these numbers.
There is a lot more in the article that is well worth reading.
The second Belsito article analyzes the looming complexities of the utilities buying 1,500 MW in a rush. It is titled “Amidst Glaring Unknowns in New Energy Law, Rate Increases Definite” and is here:
Here are three excerpts to give the flavor of the analysis. There is a lot more in the article.
1. “This is sure to be a very complex process with little guidance from the new law. The big question we have is who will wind up paying for something we previously found won’t give us much bang for our buck, where many billions of dollars will buy you a few more hours of energy at best. Big rate increases are certain but it’s unclear which ratepayers will be taking the hit and how these price increases will be distributed among them.”
2. “One point to be considered is that the law says this huge battery storage buy shall be made jointly by “every distribution company” in the State. The law is unclear on whether this includes municipal power authorities, which are not technically companies. If it does exclude them, then municipal power customers might be off the hook when it comes to paying the billions.
Assuming it is just the investor-owned utilities that most of us use, the big question is then how will the cost be divided among them? The new law is silent here. They might do it on the basis of customer equity, such as total retail sales. Or they might do it on the basis of their relative need for batteries in which case customers of one utility could see much bigger rate increases than another utility’s customers.
Another complexity is that these rate increases all have to be applied for and approved by the state Department of Public Utilities. This can be a long-drawn-out process but the bill itself puts the state under a significant deadline. Rushing to spend billions is never good policy, but it is now the law that our elected state representatives and governor approved just a week after most of them secured reelection, while the senate gave its approval days before. Presumably while the purchase process is done jointly the rate increases will be done on individual utility cases, especially if the rate increases differ a lot.
There is also a chicken and egg dilemma. The rate increases should be based on the battery costs, but the utilities cannot finalize the purchases to establish costs without the rate increases. Perhaps they will make the purchase contracts contingent upon getting the necessary rate increases. Among the uncertainty, the one thing that can be assured is that your bills will go up.”
3. “These staggering costs and who will pay them will start to come into focus with the rate increase applications that the power companies will have to file. The affected ratepayers should demand an explanation as there is no apparent use for all these thousands of extremely large, expensive and dangerous batteries that will be dotting the landscape in our communities.”
I can hardly wait for this rate increase requests to hit. People will finally see the costly absurdity of battery backup for renewables. I and others at the Net Zero Reality Coalition have been writing about this for several years. See https://www.cfact.org/netzerorealitycoalition/. Until now the issue has been academic, but this is a looming reality.
The astronomical cost of backup batteries is an issue that extends far beyond Massachusetts. We should all watch this issue storm closely.
As a source of energy information for many global and U.S. policymakers, International Energy Agency (IEA) reports speak with great authority. In its report released in April, Batteries and Secure Energy Transitions, the agency charts out a path for massive growth in battery energy storage consistent with the goal of ‘Net Zero’ by 2050.
As a source of energy information for many global and U.S. policymakers, International Energy Agency (IEA) reports speak with great authority. In its report released in April, Batteries and Secure Energy Transitions, the agency charts out a path for massive growth in battery energy storage consistent with the goal of ‘Net Zero’ by 2050.
Batteries provide an essential lynchpin in plans to reduce global carbon dioxide emissions in the Net Zero vision. The dramatic global expansion of in-battery energy storage over the coming decades is deemed necessary to facilitate the growth of wind and solar power and electrified transportation, all essential elements in the ‘Energy Transition.’
The fact that batteries are critical to the energy system of the future is treated as a given. Data from the past decade showing rising investments and lower costs for batteries are commonly offered as proof of past market success and future market viability. Projections anticipate sharp and sustained increases in global battery energy storage capacity over the next decades. It is an open question whether transforming the global market for battery energy storage by 2050 will influence other parts of the energy system. Nonetheless, in line with the zeitgeist, the authors answer this question with confidence.
The starting point is 2050 and policies must work backwards from there. The argument assumes that rapidly eliminating the internal combustion engine will leave society with no choice but to use battery powered vehicles. Similarly, the unpredictable timing of sun and wind will force humanity to reckon with the need for batteries to compensate for the intermittent renewable energy resources of the future.
A little background: Despite the advances in battery technology and the decline in their costs, some scientific and engineering realities distinguish batteries from other forms of energy storage. Like fuels, batteries store their energy chemically. In practice, however, batteries store energy less efficiently than hydrocarbon fuels and release that energy far more slowly than fuels do during combustion. Absent major breakthroughs, the technologies for storing energy and providing power using electrochemical batteries require far more mass and volume than technologies that do the same using fuels. The energy density of a storage technology is defined by its ability to store energy in a given volume or with a given mass. It is relevant and more than ironic that the energy density of biomass fuels like straw and animal dung is twenty times greater than the today‘s best lithium-ion batteries, and gasoline has an energy density over 50 times greater.
In addition, the slower release of energy from batteries is evident in the long charging times of electric vehicles and the need for ultra-high voltages to speed up charging. The mass and volume of battery energy storage only expands when one includes the power conditioning equipment, such as inverters and transformers, and the transmission lines required to integrate distributed energy resources with these facilities and with the grid. These system features will profoundly affect the technical performance, and the economics, of battery energy storage in the future.
The report addresses the challenge of supplying the many critical minerals necessary for enormous increases in battery manufacturing, including a chart showing a projected five to 30 times increase in demand for the different battery metals by 2050. However, the authors hasten to characterize this, and other daunting challenges, as “obstacles” to be managed. As in an earlier 2021 IEA publication, The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions, this report regards steep increases in demand for critical battery metals as inescapable and any difficulties arising from market pressures as manageable. With the complacent tone of bureaucrats that have reached consensus, the authors assume policy mandates and technical fixes will solve the complex problem of securing batteries minerals. They call for policy fixes to “create secure, sustainable supply chains” in order to meet the prospective growth in mineral demand. The prospect of raging geopolitical tensions and the immense scale of the necessary industrial build out are met with confidence-boosting adjectives.
Other potential drawbacks of a rapidly expanding global battery market get short shrift. The Chinese dominance in manufacturing batteries, and processing the minerals used to make them, is acknowledged but its implications left unexplored. Any mention of waste from batteries comes in connection with downstream wastes and the need for future recycling with little attention paid to the upstream wastes generated prior to battery manufacture. Passing mention of High-Pressure Acid Leaching avoids noting the recent massive implementation of this Chinese-financed, highly polluting, coal-powered process to manufacture battery-grade Nickel in Indonesia. There are no allusions to the other waste streams that would accompany enormous increases in battery manufacturing. The flammability of lithium-ion batteries, already a safety factor in aviation and maritime trade and in crowded urban areas, only merits mention in the context of new battery chemistries – Lithium Iron Phosphate (LFP) and Sodium-ion – that pose reduced fire risks are also far less energy dense.
In fact, the inherent bulkiness of battery energy storage quickly shows itself in real world applications. Using current technologies, half of the power produced by the battery pack of an electric vehicle goes to moving the batteries themselves, a basic problem for a mobile power source. Nonetheless, because battery costs play such a dominant role in the price of electric vehicles, manufacturers are turning to less expensive battery chemistries, like LFP, that exclude rare metals but have lower energy densities than current Lithium-ion batteries. For residential power grids, the volume of batteries needed to keep a city going for a full day is staggering. Consider the greater Seattle area. Powering the Seattle grid for 24 hours using batteries would require a cylinder over sixty meters in diameter at the height of the Space Needle (184 meters), filled with manufactured battery packs. Today, at the Kapolei Energy Storage outside Honolulu, over 6,000 tons of LFP batteries (enough to fill a pole one meter in diameter and the height of Mauna Loa (4170 meters)) can supply the electricity demanded by a sixth of the million residents of Oahu for three to six hours.
The report neglects options for incremental changes to the energy system that might reduce emissions more effectively and have greater potential for implementation. Consider the fact that increasing power production from natural gas and nuclear energy could reduce carbon emissions more effectively than building and maintaining the elaborate physical infrastructure necessary for solar and wind and batteries. Or the fact that hybrid electric vehicles require much smaller battery packs, leverage consumer familiarity, and may offer more promise for reducing aggregate vehicular emissions than do fully electric vehicles in the long run. Instead, the authors show a preference for algorithms that seamlessly manage real world residential and industrial energy systems. Enthusiasm pours out for “smart charging” to improve the efficiency of massive vehicle charging, “variable tariffs” to balance daily electricity demand, and “AI for innovation and sustainability.”
Climate ideology is now so pervasive that its assumptions are taken as global policy imperatives without reservation. The report ignores the sheer magnitude of industrial (and polluting) activity needed to support the market growth for battery technologies at the scale imagined, as well as the dis-economies of scale that result from the inherent limits of batteries as an energy storage technology. The lack of critical scrutiny is finally evident in the expectation that consumers and taxpayers will absorb the higher costs indefinitely through government subsidies.
In a world awash in international tensions and wars, modernizing the global energy system such that people everywhere have increasing access to affordable energy is vital to ensuring future peace and prosperity. Providing that energy abundance with the least amount of impact on nature requires confronting the realities of physics and chemistry. Massive increases in battery electric storage may be essential to an energy future imagined by resolute Net Zero technocrats. But closer scrutiny reveals serious defects in the technical basis for implementing batteries as a comprehensive solution. There are easier ways for humanity to avoid the problems that batteries are intended to solve.
The first part of this series discussed some of the shortcomings of the renewable/nonrenewable dichotomy. Renewable generation resources are not necessarily sustainable or environmentally sound and non-renewable options can be clean and highly sustainable.
“Renewables”: some resources support a healthy grid, other challenge it
The first part of this series discussed some of the shortcomings of the renewable/nonrenewable dichotomy. Renewable generation resources are not necessarily sustainable or environmentally sound and non-renewable options can be clean and highly sustainable. For example, you will find many ardent environmentalist groups strongly opposed to “renewable” biomass generation. Similarly, more and more environmentalists are dropping their objections to “nonrenewable” nuclear power. For those who are concerned with the health of the planet as well as those who want to use the earth for human flourishing the renewable/nonrenewable dichotomy is losing relevance. Referring generally to “renewable” and “nonrenewable” resources or structuring policy to favor renewable does more harm than good as we face the complicate challenges ahead in maintain an adequate electric power supply in an environmentally responsible manner.
This posting examines the impacts of various generation alternatives s on the power system and the electric grid. Renewable resources do not have a general impact on the grid; impacts vary by resource type. The various renewable resources alternatives available today differ greatly in how they impact the grid and should not be clustered. Hydro resources with storage for example, work well to support the electric grid. In fact, it may be the best resource available considering the varied needs of the major grids. Demanding loads that stress the system are often best located near hydro resources. Other “renewable” resources to a greater or lesser extent may present challenges to the operation of the grid and grid reliability. In assessing the challenges of changing resources, reports that a particular grid is operating with 80% renewables may be impressive or virtually meaningless. Of course, a grid can function well depending on 80% hydro resources, or 78% hydro and 2% wind and solar. That’s very different and much less challenging than operating a grid with a penetration level of 40% wind and solar. Let’ look at some of the important characteristics of generation resources and how they differ among resource types.
Generation alternatives, especially some renewables, differ greatly in how and when they supply power. Starting out, the first question, “is the provided energy dependable?” The chart below is the daily output taken from A solar array It shows the energy produced on a typical sunny day with clouds rolling by. You can see the unpredictability introduced by random clouds superimposed upon the predictable daily curve made by the suns path. A bigger footprint or aggregating more farms would tend to smooth the output and increase predictability. But even when greatly smoothed, the energy output is following the sun not the system load.
Electric generation in the form of alternating power has to match load on an instantaneous basis. It’s important that the total generation supply be able to match the load as it ramps up or down. Resources that are dependable and can ramp up and ramp down to follow changes in load are very valuable allowing system operators to depend on them. Plants with the best dispatchability include hydro storage facilities, natural gas plants and batteries/storage. In the middle are plants which provide dependable baseload but are more limited in how well they follow load. These plants rang from coal, combined cycle gas plants, biomass and geothermal to nuclear. Wind and solar generally complicate load following as they are not dependable or able to follow load without attached storage. Run of river hydro is rare and to the extent it is unpredictable it can create difficulties. Speaking generally of the dispatchability of “renewable” resources makes little sense.
One manifestation of load following problems is known as the “duck curve”. In 2014 I warned of the emerging duck curve here and discussed in depth issues related to dispatchability for various generation resources. Since then, as expected, it has worsened considerably. The chart shows that as solar kicks in and fades out, the remaining resources have to ramp up and ramp down at a very steep rate that greatly challenges system operation.
While the daily impacts of solar resources ramping in and out present challenges, at least solar is somewhat predictable. Wind in some locations at sometimes is predictable to a degree but in other locations and at other times it can be highly variable. Sometimes wind and solar track load changes and sometimes they work against the variance in load.
This variability presents problems beyond load following. Generating resources that can’t be counted on need back up resources. If resources might become available, dependable generation must back up those resources. As noted above hydro and batteries can work well to balance energy and it can be easy to have them on standby for that purpose. Other resources however mut be committed and running on line at lower generation levels or depending on the timeframe, in standby mode. Also coal and gas generation have start up times which may delay their availability as well as minimum cool down periods during which they cannot be operated.
I am not trying to go into detail about the intricacies of scheduling and dispatch here, but rather trying to illustrate that generation availability can create challenges that are highly dependent upon the available resource mix and the specific characteristic of the individual resources. All individual renewable and non-renewable resources have their own unique characteristics. When we wonder as to how the grid might responds to renewable, we need to know which renewables are under consideration.
VRE and IRES: The Good and the Bad of these Terms
Some of you may want to remind me that some technical work does break down renewables into a separate Variable Renewable Energy (VRE) group or Intermittent Renewable Energy Source (IRES) group when discussing issues of reliability. Certainly, speaking specifically of the challenges of integrating large amounts of VRE or IRES into the grid is an improvement over discussing the challenges of generic unspecified renewable resources. Referring to VRES and IRES can be seen as somewhat a step in the right direction consistent with the recommendations here for clearer language, but we can do better.
The term renewable in both IRES and VRE is redundant. There are no significant nonrenewable generating options that are variable or intermittent in nature. (There are limited amounts of run of river hydro in some areas.) However, my major concern with this term is that it does not recognize the larger problem currently inherent with most intermittent renewable resources. In the series Academics and the Grid, I argued that it seems like there is a deliberate effort to hide the real challenges of a net zero transition by focusing almost exclusively on the problems associated with intermittency. These names seem to help promote the misconception that variability or intermittency stand as the major challenge. .
Imagine a factory with a problem that workers are showing up late and mostly all of them are intoxicated. Upper management instead of reacting to the very real concerns around inebriated employees, focuses instead on tardiness. They bring in experts to help ensure employees show up on time and provide innovative scheduling so that gaps can be covered with extended hours once the employees show up. To the extent that the measures address the problems of “tardy” employees and that they are able to cover the hours, the more problems associated with intoxication will show up. Maybe the business fears that if the intoxication problem becomes known they will have to slow down, make major changes, maybe lose some contracts. One can imagine that a business might short term want to hide the problem of “intoxication” so that it does not impact near term goals, but for long term success it must be confronted.
The big problem with wind and solar generating resources seems almost hidden in a similar manner. Many do not want to see the march towards “renewables” slowed. It’s obvious there are problems with increasing “ the level of available renewables, but if most of the talk about the smaller problems and the greater public ignores the larger problems, perhaps this is better for the current “momentum” of available renewable options. The focus on intermittency is distracting relevant actors from the bigger looming problems ahead. Far too many policy makers think that batteries or other solutions to the intermittency problem will enable us to march ahead towards net zero with resources that currently are not up to the task.
The Big Looming Problem Associated with Increasing Wind, Solar and Batteries
The major challenges associated with increased penetration of wind and solar generation are not caused by intermittency, but rather from how the energy is injected into the grid. The electric energy produced by wind and solar is transformed by a power converter using inverters in order to synchronize with the oscillating grid. In terms of reliability, resources that spin in synchronism with the grid as electric energy is produced are much better for the grid than those resources which use inverter-based technology to convert direct for grid injection. Resources that spin with the system are called synchronous resources, while inverter-based generation is called asynchronous generation. Note – Although wind turbines spin, they do so at variable speeds, requiring them to produce direct current power which must be then be converted to AC before entering the grid.
Synchronous resources readily provide inertia and essential reliability services which support the grid. In addition to dispatchability, hydro resources are valuable because they spin in synchronism with the grid. They are typically large and among spinning resources they have great grid supporting characteristics. Good spinning resources also include nuclear, coal, geothermal, natural gas, biomass, geothermal and molten salt thermal solar plants. In terms of supporting grid reliability, wind and solar resources which rely on asynchronous inverter-based technologies are at the other extreme.
It’s important that we distinguish between inverter-based technology and spinning machines because there is a strong potential to improve inverter-based technology. To some extent now, with additional features, power converters can roughly emulate some behaviors of rotating machines and help provide important reliability functions to the grid. There is hope that inverter-based generating resources will be better able to approximate spinning generation in future years. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) recognizes that:
Managing the stability of electric power systems is based on decades of experience with large, synchronous generators. Today’s electric power systems have increasing numbers of nontraditional sources, such as wind and solar power, as well as energy storage devices, such as batteries. In addition to the variable nature of some renewable generation, many of these resources are connected to the power system through electronic power inverters.
The operation of future power systems must be based on the physical properties and control responses of traditional large, synchronous turbine generators as well as inverter-based resources. But there is no established body of experience for operating hybrid power systems with significant inverter-based resources at the scale of today’s large interconnections. To operate such systems, the assumptions that underlie generation design and control must be reexamined and modified—or even redefined—to take account of the challenges and opportunities presented by inverter-based generation.
Most inverter controllers today are grid-following and built on the assumption that system voltage and frequency are regulated by inertial sources. Such control approaches cannot guarantee system stability in low-inertia setting and are unlikely to sustain an inverter-dominated infrastructure. This limitation has inspired an investigation into grid-forming control methods for power electronic inverters, which provide functionalities that are traditionally provided by synchronous machinery.
Certainly, progress can be made. However, the Eastern Interconnection in the United States in the largest, most complicated machine in the history of the world. The challenge of adding significant amounts of asynchronous inverter-based generation increases the complexity tremendously. I have written extensively on the challenges of increasing the levels of penetration from asynchronous generation sources here, here, here, here and here. I believe that running any large complex grid without support from large rotation machines in very close to impossible within planning time frames. I see the challenge of allowing high penetration levels of asynchronous inverter-based resource as tougher than rocket science or brain surgery. Such an achievement would go beyond the moon landing, the sequencing of the human genome, the atomic bomb or a cure for the common cold.
Many entities, including the National Renewables Energy Laboratory, FERC, and NERC, are working hard to improve the functionality of asynchronous inverter based technology. They may well meet their goals to allow better grid support from these resources within the next five to ten years. Better support is possible. But that will still be a long way from eliminating the grids reliance on rotating machines.
Those who are more optimistic about the development of such technologies may end up being right. I hope so. It may be that we may have functional large grids driven by wind, solar and batteries within the lifetimes of some of our readers. But to get there, we have to recognize and acknowledge the difficulties inherent in such a transformation. Those who assume or pretend that there is no problem are either woefully ignorant or ignoring the looming problem in favor of short-term goals. Unfortunately, the challenges of asynchronous inverter based generation will not be adequately addressed of ever fixed if they are hidden.
Conclusion
Generically speaking about the impact of renewables on the grid, or what renewables can accomplish generates more confusion than clarity. Power system engineers know that it is easier to add wind, solar and batteries where there are existing supportive large hydro resources. It is harder to add wind, solar and batteries where the other resources are not that strong. Comparing the penetration levels of renewable generation for different areas with vastly differing amounts of hydro can be misleading, especially when hydro is included in the renewable category. Failing to distinguish between the capabilities of hydro, and wind and solar can lead to unrealistic selections for low hydro areas. Misconceptions on capabilities are especially a concern as existing hydro resources are increasingly challenged.
Large grids certainly can operate reliability without fossil fuel generation. Large grids can operate on 100% “renewable” energy. Reliability is not a function of the source of the energy input to the grid, but rather how that energy is injected into the grid. If solar powers spin a generator in synchronism with the grid (perhaps through the use of molten salt) that better supports reliability. If wind turbines could be made to spin only in synchronism with the grid, that would aid reliability. If the energy from hydro flows were captured with variable dc motors and injected to the grid with inverters, reliability concerns would increase. As the grid changes and we address reliability, is so much easier, direct and honest to speak of synchronous generation and inverter-based generation. The impact of “renewables” on reliability is too vague to be meaningful. Although this is the case, you frequently see references to renewable percentages which do not distinguish among the resources employed. These figures are quoted by those who want to push a perspective and they impact policy makers.
We do not face a challenge in integrating large amounts of renewable generating resources into the grid. We face operational challenges from intermittent resources. We face large reliability challenges from integrating large amounts of asynchronous inverter-based generation into the grid. The better the problem is understood, the better the problem can be addressed. We many disagree on the scope and magnitude of problems caused by intermittency as well as by asynchronous inverter-based generation. But be assured addressing the emerging problems will be go smoother, the more precisely the problems and successes are identified and defined.
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