Why the Energy Storage Industry Isn’t Taking Off
Here’s an article discuss the perils of the energy storage industry, which, in my mind, misses the central issues:
The main issue facing the energy storage industry is an ironic one: so many people benefit from it that it’s hard to decide who should pay for it. Literally everyone connected with the electricity supply chain is helped by the presence of storage: generation, transmission, distribution, and load. But our society doesn’t have a mechanism for apportioning the costs.
Most business failures derive from too little value-add; here, ironically, the case is the precise opposite.
The other main issue killing the energy storage business is that, tragically, our society is not willing to internalize the externalities of fossil fuel consumption. This enables the energy industry to use our atmosphere and waterways as its own private garbage can, completely free of charge, even though this practice is rapidly destroying the environment and damaging the health of all living things on Earth.
Storage enables a far greater integration of intermittent resources like solar and wind, but those benefits are not priced into the equation.
Although the obvious answer is a carbon fee and dividend, the huge profits associated with the energy industry and the corruptive power that it wields in our law-making processes makes changing this extremely difficult. Linked above is a group of which I’m a proud supporter.
Craig,
I think you are looking at the issue from a biased and idealistic perspective.
What you propose is uneconomic, bureaucratic and designed to solve an ideological problem not a practical benefit.
All industry produces waste and emissions. On the other hand industry produces nearly all the national wealth, prosperity required to sustain the benefits of modern civilization.
The cash cow can only give so much milk before it either dries up, or the cow moves to a better climate.
Carbon taxes, fees, emission trading schemes are recipes for fraud, inefficiency, bureaucratic bungling and huge losses of money and strangle economic activity.
Well, that’s kind of my point: apportioning the benefits of energy storage requires a complete overhaul in the way we think about the energy industry.
If you care to look into the carbon fee and dividend, you’ll find that it’s revenue neutral, has a great deal of bipartisan backing, and requires no new bureaucracy.
The reasons for the perceived needs for global energy storage technologies being elevated to such lofty heights at all in the global energy context, have been swept under the carpet and are no longer discussed or understood by ordinary people interested in the subject of future global energy imperatives and GHG.
Why is that?
I wish Frank Eggers would come out of retirement and continue to remind us all about the key factual elements of this topic.
2greenenergy have never come to terms with or focused adequately on this subject. But it is never to late to remedy this.
Lawrence Coomber
I like Frank Eggers. He wrote over one hundred comments here, virtually all of which echoed his well-taken point: the sun doesn’t shine at night and the wind doesn’t blow all the time. Nice old guy though he may be, I think a visit to a randomly chosen kindergarten class would have netted you out essentially these same data points; five-year-olds are onto this sun and wind stuff in a big way. From there, he erroneously concluded, over one hundred times, that renewable energy has no value because solar and wind are intermittent. This, of course, was completely wrong when we expressed it the first time, and ceaselessly repeating it didn’t gain him any ground.
My trying to explain to him that grid operators, every minute of every day, pay real dollars for the wind energy produced by the 82 GW installed in the US alone didn’t make a single dent.
Nice guy, though, to be sure.