Well done, gentlemen. Often overlooked in the "storage" discussion is the available storage in water; behind dams or in pumped storage facilities. Like all other sources, these options have limitations.
A minor (but important) nit with your essay - the figure showing total mineral demand lacks any sort of legend. It would be helpful if you could find that explanation.
Thanks for the input. I'll let the graphic design people know about the figure.
There are several technologies that have been brought up for potential storage solutions: batteries, pumped hydro, compressed air, concrete thermal and molten salt, carbon black-infused concrete, lifting concrete blocks with a crane, advanced rail energy storage (pushing loaded train carts up a hill and gathering the energy as they descend), etc. Each one of these technologies holds some potential, but they all have the same basic feature and all have the same basic drawback - they are net energy negative. Any battery or storage system will lose some of the energy as you transfer the energy from the primary energy source (typically hydrocarbons or nuclear) into heat or electrical energy and then into storage and then back out to heat or electrical energy again.
In this article, Josh focused on the main storage technology that is being proposed by utilities and governments.
Excellent well balanced post. ESS Inc near my home in Oregon does have an iron flow grid size battery that doesn't depend on mining of rare or toxic minerals. However, your point remains - their "compact unit" (not clear if this is 1 or 3 containers) is still very expensive to buy, install, and maintain.
From their website: “The Energy Warehouse™: Designed to serve commercial and industrial customers, this compact unit has an energy storage capacity of 400 kWh and a 25-year design life. It can be configured to provide storage durations of 4 to 12 hours.”
But a 10 MW solar plantation, for example, would require 25 of these babies; not sure if that would be a 4 hr or a 12 hr backup.
This is the problem with all of the storage solutions. As I noted above, 4 to 12 hours is fine for short interruptions. But extended outages mean we all sit in the dark and our system (economy) grinds to a halt while we pray for the sun to shine or the wind to blow. That's dangerous.
Divided by life yrs. If the rate of return is low the financing depends on a long life to get lower interest rates on borrowed money. Utilities have known this for a long time but now depend on government incentives for less reliable investment.
Correct. Then add in the “ROE” (return on equity) — the state-guaranteed annual approximate 10% return on all undepreciated assets — and you realize that running a monopoly utility is effectively a license to print money.
While you somewhat salvage it by mentioning the 24 minutes of US energy consumption, implicitly comparing the increase in battery storage capacity from 2022 to 2026 to total US GWhr PER YEAR is a bit disingenuous, don't you think? As if one should compare 24 minutes of storage to 365 days of production, rather than, say, the potential battery requirement for overnight storage if ALL electricity came from renewables?
I guess just saying cumulative storage by 2027 would be about 2% of the total potential (average) daily need for battery storage (if all energy came from non-dispatchable renewables) wasn't negative enough? Someone might have noticed that 191.6GWhr of grid batteries added by EOY 2026 will be ~17x the 2021 grid storage, and that even another 10x from 2026 to 2031 would get storage to 20%? Even just linear growth from that point on would get to 100% by about 2040.
The challenge here then is cost. Anything is technically feasible, but what are the costs vs. benefits. Also, the 100% storage scenario you discuss is for the industry standard, 4-hr batteries. How long will they last when we are dealing with dunkelflaute (dark, windless periods)? When wind/solar systems can go to zero (or near-zero) production and stay there for days or even weeks, storage can't replace nuclear and hydrocarbons.
No, I'm not at all saying that batteries should be used for dunkelflaute periods, just daily time-shifting of renewable energy production periods to demand that can't be met by renewable energy. (This should have been obvious from my mentioning 2% of daily demand for battery storage.)
Even if I WERE referring to dunkelflaute periods, that'd require far less than US total yearly demand, simply because there'd need to be SOME periods when sufficient energy to meet demand is produced, in order to have excess energy for battery or other storage to make sense. So again, your comparison was disingenuous - or at best badly mistaken.
Second, even though you're trying to be cute with statements like "that should have been obvious" and claiming that I'm being disengenuous, you still have to admit that dunkelflaute periods are a problem. When so-called renewables (i.e., wind and solar) can go to zero or near zero at any moments, building a bunch of 4-hour batteries to address time-shifting still leaves the issue of longer than 4-hour periods unaddressed.
It doesn't matter how many solar panels, wind turbines, or batteries you build. When they go to zero, you need another system that can handle 95%+ of total demand. Without that, we're all sitting in the dark. But building two complete systems is inefficient and wasteful. Better to just build a system that works and leave the hood ornaments (again, wind, solar, batteries) to the niche uses that they do work for.
First, you raised the issue of cost rather than addressing my point that "2% of daily demand for battery storage" is the correct comparison you should have made, NOT a year's worth of electricity production.
And I didn't "admit" dunkelflaute periods are a problem, as if somehow I ever claimed they were not - you're using biased language to create a strawman of my position.
If you scan the rest of the comment section, you'll find that before your first response, I had already addressed the issue of dunkelflaute periods, so I'm scarcely evading the issue just because I didn't raise it in addressing your miscomparison of current US battery storage to a year's electricity production.
And of course, it would be far more useful to consider the largest fraction of daily demand being met in regions that actually use battery storage, as that would be pertinent to how well batteries can fill that role.
At minimum you made a mistake - but with your continued evasion it appears you truly meant to confuse your readers.
Oh? Tacit admission that you can't think of a good response?
How about "Sorry, I shouldn't have tried to deceive my readers with such a bad comparison, when there are so many obvious and rational comparisons I could have used to show the real problems of shifting to renewables, without priming readers to spout nonsense easily discredited by green advocates."
Correct. I'm working on the final edits for a big paper on the cost of net-zero to the state of Michigan. I got Isaac and Mitch (the Energy Bad Boys - https://energybadboys.substack.com) to do the modeling for us and they described a situation that would use APR1400s for baseload and SMRs for peaking. That option would be far less expensive than wind, solar, and batteries and would ensure that we don't have to deal with extended (and repeated) blackouts.
NuScale - first to be approved - cancelled their plans due to cost increases. They're still trying - maybe they'll make a comeback? No others approved last I heard.
Maybe a demo plant or two running by 2035? Maybe, optimistically, by 2050 we get 10GWe of SMR capacity - MAYBE enough to replace conventional nuclear plants decommissioned by then and on-going?
I loved the idea of nuclear power building out to cleanly provide all the power we need - but the combination of short-sighted mis-management and excessive public fear of radiation has repeatedly ruined civilian nuclear's prospects. We had about a decade with no power plant radiation deaths and people started talking about a 'nuclear renaissance' - and immediately Fukushima's "mushroom clouds" ruined that, leading directly to Germany's and California's insane nuclear plant shutdowns.
Maybe SMRs, if fully (and safely) automated to remove the human element, will slowly fix nuclear's image. Or maybe we'll get a few SMR disasters related to short-sighted 'cost savings' in one of the designs, leading to all progress being stopped for a decade and heavy new oversight regulations that make them unprofitable. Historically, my bet would be on the latter.
Well done, gentlemen. Often overlooked in the "storage" discussion is the available storage in water; behind dams or in pumped storage facilities. Like all other sources, these options have limitations.
A minor (but important) nit with your essay - the figure showing total mineral demand lacks any sort of legend. It would be helpful if you could find that explanation.
Barry,
Thanks for the input. I'll let the graphic design people know about the figure.
There are several technologies that have been brought up for potential storage solutions: batteries, pumped hydro, compressed air, concrete thermal and molten salt, carbon black-infused concrete, lifting concrete blocks with a crane, advanced rail energy storage (pushing loaded train carts up a hill and gathering the energy as they descend), etc. Each one of these technologies holds some potential, but they all have the same basic feature and all have the same basic drawback - they are net energy negative. Any battery or storage system will lose some of the energy as you transfer the energy from the primary energy source (typically hydrocarbons or nuclear) into heat or electrical energy and then into storage and then back out to heat or electrical energy again.
In this article, Josh focused on the main storage technology that is being proposed by utilities and governments.
They are too expensive and you have to charge them.
Excellent well balanced post. ESS Inc near my home in Oregon does have an iron flow grid size battery that doesn't depend on mining of rare or toxic minerals. However, your point remains - their "compact unit" (not clear if this is 1 or 3 containers) is still very expensive to buy, install, and maintain.
From their website: “The Energy Warehouse™: Designed to serve commercial and industrial customers, this compact unit has an energy storage capacity of 400 kWh and a 25-year design life. It can be configured to provide storage durations of 4 to 12 hours.”
But a 10 MW solar plantation, for example, would require 25 of these babies; not sure if that would be a 4 hr or a 12 hr backup.
This is the problem with all of the storage solutions. As I noted above, 4 to 12 hours is fine for short interruptions. But extended outages mean we all sit in the dark and our system (economy) grinds to a halt while we pray for the sun to shine or the wind to blow. That's dangerous.
Return on investment =output total $- $cost/
Divided by life yrs. If the rate of return is low the financing depends on a long life to get lower interest rates on borrowed money. Utilities have known this for a long time but now depend on government incentives for less reliable investment.
Correct. Then add in the “ROE” (return on equity) — the state-guaranteed annual approximate 10% return on all undepreciated assets — and you realize that running a monopoly utility is effectively a license to print money.
While you somewhat salvage it by mentioning the 24 minutes of US energy consumption, implicitly comparing the increase in battery storage capacity from 2022 to 2026 to total US GWhr PER YEAR is a bit disingenuous, don't you think? As if one should compare 24 minutes of storage to 365 days of production, rather than, say, the potential battery requirement for overnight storage if ALL electricity came from renewables?
I guess just saying cumulative storage by 2027 would be about 2% of the total potential (average) daily need for battery storage (if all energy came from non-dispatchable renewables) wasn't negative enough? Someone might have noticed that 191.6GWhr of grid batteries added by EOY 2026 will be ~17x the 2021 grid storage, and that even another 10x from 2026 to 2031 would get storage to 20%? Even just linear growth from that point on would get to 100% by about 2040.
The challenge here then is cost. Anything is technically feasible, but what are the costs vs. benefits. Also, the 100% storage scenario you discuss is for the industry standard, 4-hr batteries. How long will they last when we are dealing with dunkelflaute (dark, windless periods)? When wind/solar systems can go to zero (or near-zero) production and stay there for days or even weeks, storage can't replace nuclear and hydrocarbons.
No, I'm not at all saying that batteries should be used for dunkelflaute periods, just daily time-shifting of renewable energy production periods to demand that can't be met by renewable energy. (This should have been obvious from my mentioning 2% of daily demand for battery storage.)
Even if I WERE referring to dunkelflaute periods, that'd require far less than US total yearly demand, simply because there'd need to be SOME periods when sufficient energy to meet demand is produced, in order to have excess energy for battery or other storage to make sense. So again, your comparison was disingenuous - or at best badly mistaken.
First, you didn't deal with costs.
Second, even though you're trying to be cute with statements like "that should have been obvious" and claiming that I'm being disengenuous, you still have to admit that dunkelflaute periods are a problem. When so-called renewables (i.e., wind and solar) can go to zero or near zero at any moments, building a bunch of 4-hour batteries to address time-shifting still leaves the issue of longer than 4-hour periods unaddressed.
It doesn't matter how many solar panels, wind turbines, or batteries you build. When they go to zero, you need another system that can handle 95%+ of total demand. Without that, we're all sitting in the dark. But building two complete systems is inefficient and wasteful. Better to just build a system that works and leave the hood ornaments (again, wind, solar, batteries) to the niche uses that they do work for.
First, you raised the issue of cost rather than addressing my point that "2% of daily demand for battery storage" is the correct comparison you should have made, NOT a year's worth of electricity production.
And I didn't "admit" dunkelflaute periods are a problem, as if somehow I ever claimed they were not - you're using biased language to create a strawman of my position.
If you scan the rest of the comment section, you'll find that before your first response, I had already addressed the issue of dunkelflaute periods, so I'm scarcely evading the issue just because I didn't raise it in addressing your miscomparison of current US battery storage to a year's electricity production.
And of course, it would be far more useful to consider the largest fraction of daily demand being met in regions that actually use battery storage, as that would be pertinent to how well batteries can fill that role.
At minimum you made a mistake - but with your continued evasion it appears you truly meant to confuse your readers.
🥱
Oh? Tacit admission that you can't think of a good response?
How about "Sorry, I shouldn't have tried to deceive my readers with such a bad comparison, when there are so many obvious and rational comparisons I could have used to show the real problems of shifting to renewables, without priming readers to spout nonsense easily discredited by green advocates."
Of course, if you have SMRs as DEFRs, you don't need either renewables or batteries. https://edreid.substack.com/p/redundant-capacity
Correct. I'm working on the final edits for a big paper on the cost of net-zero to the state of Michigan. I got Isaac and Mitch (the Energy Bad Boys - https://energybadboys.substack.com) to do the modeling for us and they described a situation that would use APR1400s for baseload and SMRs for peaking. That option would be far less expensive than wind, solar, and batteries and would ensure that we don't have to deal with extended (and repeated) blackouts.
Sure. Except how fast can SMRs be brought online?
NuScale - first to be approved - cancelled their plans due to cost increases. They're still trying - maybe they'll make a comeback? No others approved last I heard.
Maybe a demo plant or two running by 2035? Maybe, optimistically, by 2050 we get 10GWe of SMR capacity - MAYBE enough to replace conventional nuclear plants decommissioned by then and on-going?
I loved the idea of nuclear power building out to cleanly provide all the power we need - but the combination of short-sighted mis-management and excessive public fear of radiation has repeatedly ruined civilian nuclear's prospects. We had about a decade with no power plant radiation deaths and people started talking about a 'nuclear renaissance' - and immediately Fukushima's "mushroom clouds" ruined that, leading directly to Germany's and California's insane nuclear plant shutdowns.
Maybe SMRs, if fully (and safely) automated to remove the human element, will slowly fix nuclear's image. Or maybe we'll get a few SMR disasters related to short-sighted 'cost savings' in one of the designs, leading to all progress being stopped for a decade and heavy new oversight regulations that make them unprofitable. Historically, my bet would be on the latter.