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Thread: Does Battery Backup Make Large Scale Wind/Solar Viable?

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  1. #1
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    Does Battery Backup Make Large Scale Wind/Solar Viable?

    Cost is always the issue and limiting factor —

    Wind and solar are expensive, inefficient and intermittent.
    Batteries won't solve the problem.

    Brilliant mathematician David Wojick explains the unforgiving numbers in an important article at CFACT.org:

    First comes the cost of utility scale battery facilities. This is much more than just the cost of the batteries. At utility scale these are large, complex facilities. Connecting all of the batteries involved and getting them to work properly together is a big challenge in itself. AC-DC-AC conversions are also a big deal, plus there are buildings, transmission stuff, etc...

    Suppose we want to store enough juice to back up the wind farm for just one day, when the wind speed is too low to generate any power. Let’s say we simply need 100 MW for 24 hours, or 2,400 MWh.

    At $1.5 million per MWh that is a whopping $3,600 million or $3.6 billion. In short, the batteries cost 24 times more than the “backed up” wind farm costs. In fact in this case the battery cost will be the number of hours times the wind farm cost.

    This huge cost certainly makes the wind farm unaffordable, but it gets much worse. Under standard conditions a wind farm produces no power around 25% of the time, due to low wind conditions. Low wind periods of up to a week are fairly common, created by stagnant huge high pressure systems. The power battery system has to be big enough to accommodate these long periods of no wind power.

    A week has 168 hours so we need 16,800 MWh of battery storage capacity, at the enormous cost of $25.2 billion, just to make a $150 million wind farm reliable. This would obviously be absurd, which makes the whole idea of battery backup absurd. Even if the cost of batteries were to come way down, say by 90%, the cost would still be wildly prohibitive.

    Climate campaigners, and the corporations cashing in on wind and solar subsidies, like to say that the wind and the sun are "free." The reality cannot be further from the truth.

    Unfortunately, batteries do not present a viable means to get wind and solar to make sense.
    A deeper look —
    https://www.cfact.org/2019/04/26/bat...eid=7e1fe76a24

    Wouldn’t it be nice if... hardly ever is.” — Wacojoe
    The math is a harsh mistress.
    ...............
    “You can vote your way into socialism, but you have to shoot your way out.” — Too fundamental to have an attribution


  2. #2
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    I can't imagine anyone, with even a reasonable level of knowledge, would think that, with current technology, battery powered back-up is anything but a fools fairy tale.

    ....and for the record, I don't regard AOC as falling into the "reasonable level of knowledge".
    "A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity, an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty” ---Sir Winston Churchill
    "Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world's ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all." ---John W. Gardner
    “You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” ---C. S. Lewis

  3. #3
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    Without viable backup mass scale wind/solar is worse than worthless, yet vast numbers of people and politicians are throwing incredible amounts of money and resources at them.
    ...............
    “You can vote your way into socialism, but you have to shoot your way out.” — Too fundamental to have an attribution


  4. #4
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    Not really, Joe. They have standby power plants that can come online on short notice too take up the slack.
    The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible - Arthur C. Clarke

  5. #5
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    Quote Originally Posted by Mike View Post
    Not really, Joe. They have standby power plants that can come online on short notice too take up the slack.
    What Mike said!

    They are also learning that the grid can accommodate a far greater portion of the total load coming from renewable sources than they previously thought.

    Your politics are tripping up your science Joe
    "A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity, an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty” ---Sir Winston Churchill
    "Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world's ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all." ---John W. Gardner
    “You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” ---C. S. Lewis

  6. #6
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    The "hot standby" generators can be online in as little as 2 minutes. Keeping them ready is costly and the power they produce costs more than the normal generation. Think of it like NORAD with "hot" aircraft on the line waiting to be called into action.
    The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible - Arthur C. Clarke

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