Energy Storage Is Changing the Entire Energy/Transportation Landscape
Here’s a story about two very progressive companies dealing with 21st Century energy: Tesla and Sierra Nevada (a top-notch beer brewery). The essence is that Tesla has installed a fairly large battery storage system, apparently to lower energy costs for their customers by enabling them to purchase off-peak power and use it at on-peak times. In reality, of course, this means much more; it’s an indication of the breadth of Telsa’s commitment to change the entire energy and transportation sector.
Remember: Anybody who bets against Elon Musk is an idiot.
Storing energy during off-peak hours to use during peak hours requires only a few hours of storage. That is very different from the amount of storage required to make renewables reliable without depending on fossil fuels for back-up. It does not prove the practicality of solar and wind power systems to provide adequate and reliable power for large prosperous countries.
We don’t even know how much storage would be required to make renewables a reliable source of power. Acquiring that information would require studies which have never been done but which should have been done. It would require installing solar and wind sensors at many of the locations where it would be reasonable to install actual solar and wind power systems. Then, the data would have to be collected for a period of years and analyzed to determine what the storage requirements would be to get adequate and reliable power and what the optimal mix of solar and wind systems would be. That has never been done. Instead, we are being expected to assume, with exceedingly insufficient evidence, that with currently available technology, solar and wind systems could provide adequate power.
I question the wisdom of making multi-billion dollar commitments in the absence of sufficient proof that the investment will achieve the necessary results. It is truly bizarre that the advocates of wind and solar have not, to bolster their position, demanded that an adequate study be done to determine whether their position is reasonable. Of course such a study would be very expensive, but the expense would be trivial when compared with the alternative of spending billions of dollars on energy technologies THEN finding that they cannot do the job.
Renewable energy (in particular wind and solar PV) generation are not suitable substitute technologies for consideration for use as ‘base load, large capacity, greenhouse gas mitigating’ generation technologies. They were never designed to be so!
Suggestions that by adding energy storage technologies to these unreliable and minuscule generation contributors somehow changes their status from ‘meaningless and totally inappropriate base-load technologies’ to ‘meaningful and appropriate’ base-load technologies, defies belief, is simply ludicrous, and is misinformation being presented to a vulnerable public with extreme prejudice to boot.
There are rapidly increasing and critically important roles for renewable energy generation technologies to play globally as they have been for the last 20 years or more, and these roles will broaden and escalate as new cost effective energy storage technologies come into focus, and we should all welcome this renewable energy technologies global growth.
But what serious commentators and analysts need to clearly understand and come to terms with, is that there is a clear and indisputable distinction between these two subjects:
(1) The suitability of renewable energy technologies generation and the scope of their useful and appropriate deployment, and;
(2) The replacement technologies to current fossil fuel base-load generation, with new age enduring, energy dense generation technology that will deliver abundant, reliable, clean, safe, and low cost energy for base-load network distribution for the use of all people and industries, including developing nations and energy deprived regions, and at the same time eliminate global energy generation greenhouse gas emissions to insignificant levels permanently.
There are two very different subjects at play here that are often mistakenly (and deceptively) ‘rolled’ into only one subject in general discussion, and the focus on critical climate change science is abandoned in the process. This is a huge mistake.
Without energy dense ‘non-renewable’ generation technologies being rapidly developed and deployed worldwide for base-load transmission, that will deliver abundant, clean, safe, and low cost energy for network distribution for the use of all people and industries, greenhouse gas emissions will soar with devastating consequences so severe that the phenomena of climate change may prove impossible to reverse.
2GreenEnergy has a very thin history on encouraging any professional and serious debate on these technology topics outlined.
The only regular contributor who consistently demonstrates a professional understanding of this critical subject is Frank Eggers, whose views deserve the full support and encouragement of all commentators and readers alike.
Lawrence Coomber