Giant rechargeable batteries could soon be installed across Britain to help power wind farms and solar panels "Speaking to the Sunday Times, he said: ‘We get 14 per cent of our electricity from intermittent sources [such as wind and solar] . . . but this intermittency does add costs.'" More below. The reason is if you do the not so hard math, the cost of electricity does not just skyrocket; it becomes unaffordable for even the wealthy. Although we probably should require that the rich blow harders like Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio buy this electricity to power their myriad homes, EVs, etc. Worse, these sources do not reduce fossil fuel and nuclear power generation, but do increase carbon emitted. The FTC should file an action for false advertising.
Battery Pack Prices Plunge!!! Down to $200/kWh "So-called renewable energy sources face many economic and thermodynamic hurdles; all of which are routinely ignored by the government officials who spend our tax dollars. One of the biggest hurdles is storage. The only way wind and solar could ever reliably provide base-load is through the deployment of economically sustainable storage systems. Battery packs are one of the favored “solutions.” Li-ion battery prices have “plunged”since 2010 from $1,000/kWh to just over $200/kWh. Bloomberg New Energy Finance is ecstatic about this." Be still my beating heart! So, what will the cost of PV electricity be with storage? "Words fail me. Well, maybe not totally fail me. We currently pay about 10¢ per kWh for electricity. Our electric utility can afford to sell us electricity for 10¢/kWh largely due to the fact that natural gas-fired power plants generate electricity for about 6¢/kWh. The Energy Information Agency forecasts that solar PV power plants entering service in 2022 will be able to generate electricity for 8.5¢/kWh. This would make solar PV competitive with natural gas… Right? Nooooo. Natural gas combined cycle has an average capacity factor of 87%. Solar PV’s average capacity factor is 25%. So, you would have to deploy at least 3 MW of solar PV to offset 1 MW of natural gas. Then you would have to deploy a storage system to deliver electricity when “the Sun don’t shine.” At $200/kWh, solar PV with storage would run about $58/kWh to fully offset natural gas at $0.06/kWh…" Whut!!! I was going to calculate the percentage increase in price from 0.06/kWh to 58/kWh, but my calculator had a heart attack. Assuming a 1,000kWh monthly usage the cost for the family would be the low, low price of $58,000 per month! How cool is that? Should your family run into a cold winter or hot summer and need to use 3,000kWh the cost would be, er, um, well, higher! It would be $174,000/month! But you know how nice it is to have electricity so that everyone will pay up, right? Ok, I realize the battery is rechargeable which reduces the cost over time, but even so, the cost would be high, and the risk would be even greater since it is unclear how many recharge cycles these batteries could survive, or the shape of the lifetime recharge degradation curve. Nor do we have any idea the actual price of these batteries since so many would be needed to back up even a nominal amount of power in a small town, let alone a large city, state or nation. These batteries would soak up the world's supply of lithium driving prices skyward. The first small town might get a reasonable deal, but after that, all bets would be off. The dirty little secret of solar and wind electrical generation is these sources only produce as much electricity as it takes to manufacture the parts; assemble the devices; site, construct, install, maintain the devices, and transmit power. There is little energy profit from either solar or wind power facilities. Because these sources are intermittent and the power grid cannot handle intermittency, these source of power must either have fossil fuel backups or storage. Both consume the solar and wind energy profit, meaning that it the net results are solar and wind ends up using more fossil fuels than fossil fuel generation alone. Remember also that these batteries release huge amounts of carbon in their construction. As an example, the Tesla auto battery production releases as much carbon as operating a gasoline auto for eight years. These AE back up batteries will release a massive amount of carbon! Tesla car battery production releases as much CO2 as 8 years of gasoline driving The problem is the seen versus the unseen. We can see that there is a small intermittent stream of electricity coming from the solar or wind power generation site. We can calculate this energy and determine what the facility will produce over its useful life. What we don't see is the larger amount of energy that it took to get the plant producing and transmitting energy over its useful life. Because the total amount of energy to produce the alternative power source is larger than the amount of energy the plant produces over its useful life, solar and wind are power users, not producers, and net carbon emitters not reducers.
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