Posted on 01/17/2021 5:40:22 PM PST by george76
California has hooked up a grid battery system that is almost ten times bigger than the previous world record holder, but when it comes to making renewables reliable it is so small it might as well not exist.
The new battery array is rated at a storage capacity of 1,200 megawatt hours (MWh); easily eclipsing the record holding 129 MWh Australian system built by Tesla a few years ago. However, California peaks at a whopping 42,000 MW. If that happened on a hot, low wind night this supposedly big battery would keep the lights on for just 1.7 minutes (that’s 103 seconds). This is truly a trivial amount of storage.
Mind you this system is being built to serve just Pacific Gas & Electric. But they by coincidence peak at about half of California, or 21,000 MWh, so they get a magnificent 206 seconds of peak juice. Barely time to find the flashlight, right?
There is no word on what this trivial giant cost, since PG&E does not own it. That honor goes to an outfit called Vistra that does a lot of different things with electricity and gas. But these complex battery systems are not cheap.
This one reportedly utilizes more than 4,500 stacked battery racks, each of which contains 22 individual battery modules. That is 99,000 separate modules that have to be made to work well together. Imagine hooking up 99,000 electric cars and you begin to get the picture.
The US Energy Information Administration reports that grid scale battery systems have averaged around $1.5 million a MWh over100% renewable deception the last few years. At that price this trivial piece of storage cost just under TWO BILLION DOLLARS. At 103 seconds of peak storage that is about $18,000,000 a second. Money for nothing.
Mind you the PG&E engineers are not that stupid. They know perfectly well that this billion dollar battery is not there to provide backup power when wind and solar do not produce. In fact the truth is just the opposite. The battery’s job is to prevent wind and solar power from crashing the grid when they do produce.
It is called grid stabilization. Wind and solar are so erratic that it is very hard to maintain the constant 60 cycle AC frequency that all our wonderful electronic devices require. If the frequency gets more than just a tiny bit off the grid blacks out. Preventing these crashes requires active stabilization.
Grid instability due to erratic wind and solar used to not be a problem, because the huge spinning metal rotors in the coal, gas and nuclear power plant generators simply absorbed the fluctuations. But most of those plants have been shut down, so we need billion dollar batteries to do what those plants did for free. Nor is this monster battery the only one being built in California to try to make wind and solar power work. Many more are in the pipeline and not just in California. Many states are struggling with instability as baseline generators are switched off.
There is even an insane irony here, one that is perfect for Crazy California. This billion dollar battery occupies the old generator room of a shut down gas fired power plant. Those generators used to make the grid stable. Now we are struggling to do it.
Of course no one at PG&E or Vistra says publicly that this monster battery is there to keep renewables from trashing the grid, not to back them up. One wonders if the California Public Utilities Commission knows this? The big question is why is the rate paying public not told? Or the press? There is really a very expensive hoax here.
While on this topic, let’s ask what it would actually cost to back up wind and solar with batteries. This depends a lot on local climate. How often the wind does not blow hard for example. Wind generators need about 10 mph just to start and more like a sustained 30 mph for full power.
Multi-day heat waves are often periods of very low wind, combined with a maximum need for power. A nasty combination. So my rough rule of thumb is that you need storage of 7 days times peak need.
California peaks at 42,000 MWh and 7 days is 168 hours so using this rough rule we would need about 7 million MWh of batteries. This makes 1200 MWh truly trivial. Then at $1.5 million a MWh we get an astounding 10.5 TRILLION DOLLARS, just for the batteries to make renewables reliable.
The scam is breathtaking, and not just in California. Nationwide we are spending untold billions of dollars trying to keep the erratic nature of renewables from crashing the electric power system. But these efforts are routinely portrayed as storage for when renewables do not run. Stabilization is the opposite of storage. We are being lied to about renewables.
“We are being lied to about renewables.”
We are being lied to about EVERYTHING. President Trump certainly showed us that. :(
Secretly? Ha. Wait until everyone is riding in an electric rickshaw.
When your average leftist finds out that electricity does not grow on trees, it just crushes them!
shocker
“Stabilization is the opposite of storage. We are being lied to [again] about renewables.”
When they run out of energy they will nationalize the Oil Industry. It won’t take us long to equal Venezuela, if we are not there already.
The dang commercial they run for California renewable energy has a small caption asking us to limit our power usage between 4pm and midnight. I guess everyone will come home from work, won’t be able to plug in the car, cook dinner, wash clothes, wash themselves, sit in the hot house, unable to prepare for the next day’s work. It is a complete joke.
Can’t we tie AOC to this battery pack?
Chemical Batteries look a lot like big capacitors for all practical purposes.
pretty sure I read somewhere that all new residential construction in Cali had to have a solar system on the roof..
That's wrong. Peak demand doesn't last all day. And demand is MW not MWh. Probably need to cut his peak number in half to get average demand. But supply won't go to zero either. That's not plausible for even one minute and it's certainly not plausible to have 7 days with no, or greatly reduced supply.
His general point is valid, that storage is expensive. But his numbers are crap.
“pretty sure I read somewhere that all new residential construction in Cali had to have a solar system on the roof..”
But not batteries in the basement? [I know, I know basements in Calif. are rare.]
A point made with valid information is a valid point, but basic mistakes like what you highlighted take away from what might otherwise be a completely valid point.
“One wonders if the California Public Utilities Commission knows this?’
Of course they did. If you are a regular worker and speak up, you lose your job.
What is the California solar mandate?
The California solar mandate is a new building code that requires new construction homes to have a solar photovoltaic (PV) system as an electricity source. This code, which goes into effect on January 1, 2020, applies to both single-family homes and multi-family homes that are up to three stories high.
The solar panel system needs to be large enough to meet the annual electricity usage of the building; given that electricity usage can be difficult to determine in new construction projects, builders use an estimate for each property that’s based on the building’s floor space and the climate zone in which it’s located.
However, there is flexibility when it comes to sizing the solar panel system: for one, builders can decrease the size requirement of a system on a property by incorporating battery storage into the building. In fact, you can reduce the required size of the solar panel system by as much as 25 percent when you pair it with a solar battery, such as the Tesla Powerwall or LG Chem RESU10H. Plus, by incorporating energy efficiency measures or other demand-responsive measures into building design alongside battery storage, the required PV system sizes can be downsized by 40 percent or more.
Something else not looked at closely, is how much energy it takes to produce these wind and solar sources and the batteries needed to store the energy.
My guess is that it’s going to be more than the wind and solar produce in their lifetime, IOW, a net energy loss.
So not only is it going to be prohibitively expensive, but it will likely take more energy to produce than the amount of energy it does produce. A complete exercise in futility, the ultimate in virtue signalling.
Hmm, I wonder how much pollution is produced in the manufacture of those batteries, and how much pollution is produced when they fail and must be discarded.
For something that is supposed to “save” the environment, it strikes me that “renewables” are incredibly wasteful and polluting. Not to mention their effects on wild bird populations.
It is typical of the left to glom onto something as a wonderful solution to a [largely invented] problem, just because it is different and not because it actually makes anything better.
Coming soon to USA.
Don’t worry Biden will pump Trillions into it
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