CFACT: The political fantasy of 100% renewable electricity is sweeping the nation. Governors and mayors, towns and cities, and whole States are vying for who can get there first. California’s 2045 target date was recently topped by Colorado’s incoming Governor’s announced target of 2040, just 21 short years from now.
This 100% goal sounds so good politically that it is irresistible. Clean energy for everyone. Unfortunately, converting America to 100% renewable energy is completely unrealistic as engineering, which means we are headed for big trouble. Committing to the impossible is a truly bad plan.
The problem is batteries, which we never hear about when these grand plans are announced. Batteries are not included, even though they will be needed in impossible quantities. Here are the simple facts which dare not be mentioned.
While there are “utility scale” battery systems, their national total is virtually zero compared to what would be needed to achieve 100% renewable generation of electricity. Renewable generators like wind and solar only generate less than 50% of the time, sometimes a lot less, sometimes not at all. This is called the problem of intermittency.
To overcome intermittency, we need to generate a lot more juice than needed when the renewable generators are working and store it to use when they are not working, which is most of the time. This can be done for a house, especially one that uses very little electricity. It does not work for a nation that uses a lot of juice per capita, far more than a house does.
Household electricity is actually a relatively small fraction of power usage. There is also commercial usage, from office buildings and malls to server farms. There is municipal usage, like street lighting, water supply and sewage treatment. Then there is massive industrial usage, up to and including steel mills.
Note too that many of the same people who are calling for 100% renewable power are also calling for converting our transportation system to electric power, by banning the internal combustion engine. This added demand for juice would roughly double today’s need. Let us ignore this for the moment, but keep it in mind.
Just building the renewable generating capacity to go 100% is a monster job, especially over just 20 to 25 years. America’s generating capacity today is well over a million megawatts (MW). Most of this is nuclear, coal or gas fired. Wind is around 100,000 MW and solar maybe 50,000 MW (including personal residential stuff). So getting to a million MW of wind and solar is a huge task.
But given intermittency, building that entire monster renewable generating capacity still only gets us less than half way there. We also need to be able to store more than half of the output, on average.
Even worse, we have to be able to handle the high end cases, where the renewable generators do not work for several days at a time. For example, the maximum use of electricity often happens during heat waves where there is very little wind. These heat waves can easily last a week. Because they are due to large stagnant high pressure systems, these low wind heat waves can cover vast portions of the U.S., knocking out all of the wind power. On the solar side, in many parts of the country it is not unusual to have a week of cloudy and rainy or snowy weather. read more
Please don’t allow real science, facts and common sense enter the thought process regarding renewable energy. It’s such a downer.
With renewable energy we’ll always have a sunny, windy day.
Who needs batteries when we’ll all feel good skipping through the field of flowers singing “We are the World”.
Wait! Shouldn’t this be on the Stormy Daniels thread?
We have 100% renewable energy for our heating needs here. And if the weather is somewhat nice tomorrow, I’ll go cut down a few more of those renewables for next season’s fuel. At least hereabouts, we have the wits to burn trees in a stove and not let them rot or burn on the ground.
Are the people who come up with these calculations graduates of common core math?
Ooooopps! Make that “in” the Stormy Daniels thread…
Holy Al Gore, Batman.
Reminds me of asshole salesmen who sell the customer a system, with no idea how the engineer’s going to create &implement it – or if he even can.
really enraged – Why? Are you concerned about piston slap?
I gots a hot tip for the Enviro-Stupids… so long as there are fossil fuels in the ground, sumbody iz gonna extract them! I’ll be damned if its gonna be everybody else on the planet EXCEPT US!!
It just occurred to me that there’s a potential solution to this delusional dilemma: Smart Meters. Let all those brain-addled greenies sign up for renewable electricity supplies and control their usage remotely via the metering. Charge them what the renewable juice costs, and shut down their HVAC, cable, high speed internet, and gaming consoles when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine. As a concession, sell them home battery storage at cost. I’m sure Steyer and Gore would be glad to subsidize that endeavor.
Give them what they ask for. Let them try to live with what they get. The rest of us will simply keep on using cheap, reliable nuke/fossil/hydro base line power plus combined cycle gas turbine peaking gennies, laughing at the enviro-idiots all the while.
Al, the only 100% source of renewable energy available on the planet is called “slavery”.
Get Elon Musk to make all the batteries needed.
Make ’em in China.
With US Taxpayer funds.
@Burner – At least that way all the lithium extraction pollution stays over there.
Take every democrat leader and every democrat media hack and every college leftists professor and administrator and every democrat hack sabotaging our government, and strap them to stationary bicycles with generators attached, and make them pedal in return for food and water for distribution of electricity to the rest of us.
Think of all that energy
@TRF: Yeah. I’m getting pretty old…