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Most anyone (with at least SOME common sense) that has looked at 'green' energy recognizes the STUPIDITY of thinking you can convert our hydrocarbon based economy to renewal - with current technology and what can be reasonably be foreseen.

All discussion in the Plans of storage needs and capacity is expressed in units of gigawatts (GW). Now, GW of capacity can certainly be relevant in this context, because assuring that power can be delivered from these massive batteries quickly enough to satisfy peak demand is definitely an important engineering challenge. But another whole subject is gigawatt hours (GWH); in other words, is the total amount of energy stored by the system sufficient to carry you through the longest possible period when demand will exceed supply? How about if there are entire seasons — like “winter” — when days are short, cloudiness is high, the wind has extended periods of calm, and batteries could be getting drawn down for weeks or even months on end? How much will you need in the way of GWH of storage capacity to support this entirely-wind-and-solar system; and how much will that cost?

Not to keep you in suspense, the answer is something like $6.7 trillion, given that electricity would have to be stored for up to seven or eight months. California’s gross domestic product is less than half that amount.

My colleague Isaac Orr carried out a similar calculation for just one state, Minnesota. Isaac found that to store enough electricity to meet Minnesota’s needs for one day would cost around $38.7 billion. He used a battery cost, $250 per kilowatt hour, that is in the same range that Francis used, based on pricing data from Tesla, which ostensibly will supply California’s batteries.

Battery storage is prohibitively expensive, and if you think it is expensive now, just wait until the world’s supplies of lithium and cobalt are further depleted by governments’ voracious appetite for “green” energy.
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tracycoyle 8 May 12
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