In California, as we all know, the inhabitants and their elected officials are far more sophisticated and virtuous than the rest of us rubes who inhabit the other parts of the country.
This particularly goes for the arena of climate change, where California is leading the way to saving the planet by rapidly eliminating all of the carbon emissions coming from its electricity sector.
California’s CO2 emissions are about 1% of the world annual total, and its electricity sector accounts for about 15% of those emissions, so we’re talking here about approximately 0.15% of world emissions — an amount whose elimination, as you can easily see, will rapidly transform the world’s climate.
In 2018 California enacted a law known as SB100, which mandates a 100% carbon emissions-free electricity sector by 2045.
But how to get from here to there? That question was finally answered in March of this year when the California state agencies responsible for achieving the goal (California Energy Commission, California Public Utilities Commission, and California Air Resources Board) issued a Joint Agency Report and accompanying Summary Document setting forth their Plans. The Plans can be accessed via this link.
The Plans show that the California regulators have absolutely no idea what they are doing. Perhaps I am wrong. I invite all readers to check me and see if I am missing something. But I don’t think so.
Either these people do not understand the basic units used for these calculations, or they cannot do basic arithmetic or both. In their projection of incremental costs, I think they are off by a factor of about 1000 or more.
The answer given in the Plans as to how to get to a zero-emissions electricity sector is to build lots and lots of solar and wind power facilities. Obviously, those don’t work all the time, so to start with you need to build far more capacity than your peak usage.
California’s peak power usage is currently about 40 GW, and that is projected to increase substantially as more of the economy gets electrified, for example, automobiles.
So the Plans call for the addition of some 97.6 GW of solar capacity and 22.6 GW of wind capacity by 2045, on top of 26.5 GW of those two currently existing. (The Plans also call for the addition of 0.1 GW of geothermal capacity, but that is a rounding error.).
With the additions, California would have a total of some 146.7 GW of wind and solar capacity, which may be around triple peak usage after you account for incremental electrification of the economy by 2045.
But then solar and wind power are “intermittent,” meaning that they don’t necessarily deliver the power when you need it. What are we going to do about providing power on completely calm nights, when solar and wind deliver nothing?
The California regulators have an answer for that here in the Plans, which is “storage.” And how much storage will we need? They give a very specific figure: 52.8 GW.
Perhaps that may seem to make sense at first blush. If peak usage is around 50 GW by 2045, then 52.8 GW of storage may be just about enough, with a very small margin, to deliver power at a sufficient rate to satisfy demand when the solar and wind are completely dead.
And how much will all this cost? We’ll be replacing all the current fossil fuel generation with wind and solar facilities, plus adding enough storage to make it all work. Here’s the calculation:
Modeling results indicate that achieving 100 percent clean electricity will increase the total annual electricity system costs by nearly $4.6 billion by 2045. This is 6 percent more than the cost under the state’s Renewables Portfolio Standard requirement of having at least 60 percent clean electricity by the end of 2030.
Basically, it’s chump change. After all, “modeling results” prove it.
But are we maybe missing something? Here’s a piece that I think is more than a little significant: All discussion in the Plans of storage needs and capacity is expressed in units of gigawatts (GW).
Now, GW of capacity can certainly be relevant in this context, because assuring that power can be delivered from these massive batteries quickly enough to satisfy peak demand is definitely an important engineering challenge.
But another whole subject is gigawatt-hours (GWh); in other words, is the total amount of energy stored by the system sufficient to carry you through the longest possible period when demand will exceed supply?
How about if there are entire seasons — like “winter” — when days are short, cloudiness is high, the wind has extended periods of calm, and batteries could be getting drawn down for weeks or even months on end?
How much will you need in the way of GWh of storage capacity to support this entirely wind-and-solar system; and how much will that cost?
There’s nothing about that subject that I can find in these Plans. Can you find it?
Back in 2018, a guy named Roger Andrews made just such a calculation and published it on a website called Energy Matters.
I covered the subject in a November 2018 post titled “How Much Do The Climate Crusaders Plan To Increase Your Costs Of Electricity? — Part III.”
Mr. Andrews used actual daily production data from existing California wind and solar facilities to project how much of such facilities would be needed to satisfy California’s total annual demand over the course of a full year; and then further used the same data to calculate daily surpluses and deficits, to figure out how much battery capacity, in GWh, would be needed to get through the longest period of low production.
The most important lesson from Andrews’s work — which emerges from simply looking at the data for actual daily production from existing wind and solar facilities — is that production from these facilities is not just intermittent within a day or a week, but is also highly seasonal, with higher production in the spring and fall, and lower production most notably in the winter.
Here is Andrews’s chart showing production from existing wind and solar facilities, normalized to satisfy all demand over the course of a year, plotted against actual demand on a daily basis:
The large spring surpluses and winter deficits leap out at the eye. Andrews then calculated — and this is purely a matter of simple arithmetic — daily surpluses and deficits to figure out how much battery capacity California would need to carry it through a full year.
Here are his charts showing that work:
The bottom line is that it would take about 25,000 GWh of stored energy to get through the full year. The batteries would get to that level around August, and get drawn down all the way through March.
And of course, that’s at a peak usage of about 40 GW. Ramp that up to more like 50 GW peak usage, and you’ll need more like 32,000 GWh of storage.
So how much will that cost? In my November 2018 post, the answer for California was “around $5 trillion.” Let’s see if we can get a more up-to-date figure.
According to this post at Electrek on April 1, 2021, Apple — in an effort to demonstrate its extreme corporate climate virtue — plans to construct a gigantic battery project to enable its corporate headquarters to run on just solar power. From Apple’s press release:
“Apple is constructing one of the largest battery projects in the country, California Flats — an industry-leading, grid-scale energy storage project capable of storing 240 megawatt-hours of energy, enough to power over 7,000 homes for one day. This project supports the company’s 130-megawatt solar farm that provides all of its renewable energy in California, by storing excess energy generated during the day and deploying it when it is most needed.”
The batteries are being supplied by Tesla. Based on pricing data from Tesla, indicating the cost of such batteries in the range of $200 – $300 per kilowatt-hour, Electrek calculates Apple’s cost for the 240 MWh of battery capacity at about $50 million.
So what then would be the cost for the 32,000-gigawatt-hours worth of these batteries? You do the math. If it helps, there are a million KWh in one GWh. I’m getting about $6.7 trillion.
$6.7 trillion is well more than double the annual GDP of California. Remember that the Plans of California’s joint agency task force said that the incremental costs of the all-wind-and-solar-plus-storage system were going to run around $4.6 billion. Could they really be off by a factor of well over 1,000?
Meanwhile, California marches forward with big additions to its grid battery capacity, supposedly to balance the grid in light of additions of solar and wind power.
But are the additions meaningful to that task, or remotely cost-effective? Here is a post from RenewEconomy on April 5:
A recent report published by Bloomberg Green citing new BloombergNEF numbers revealed that the leading power analysts expect California to not only install 1.7 GW worth of new battery storage in 2021, but another 1.4 GW in 2022 followed by 1.2 GW in 2023.
Always GW, never GWh. Trying to get any useful information out of these people is almost impossible. I think they are all completely innumerate. Out of 40 million people in California, isn’t there a single person who can even ask a relevant question?
My view continues to be that the best thing that could happen for the country and the world would be for these people to try to build out their utopia as fast as humanly possible, and have it crash and burn quickly for all to see and learn from.
Or maybe they will succeed. I certainly wish them the best, but on all the evidence they have no idea what they are doing.
Read more at Manhattan Contrarian
ALL GOOD COMMENTS FOR WHICH I HAVE ONLY TO SAY NO ONE MENTIONED THAT WIND AND SOLAR HAS ONLY A LIFESPAN OF 15 TO 20 YEARS WHICH DOES NOT COVER THEIR CARBON FOOTPRINT OF MANUFACTURING BY FOSSIL FUELS AND A HIGH COST OF REPLACING WHERAS COAL PLANTS LAST 50 TO 70 YEARS CAN NONE OF THESE IDIOTS WORK THIS OUT . THINK OF THE INFRACTURE COULD BE BUILT WITH THIS MONEY HOSPITALS , SCHOOLS , POLICE ETC .
What a crock of rubbish! The graph you relied on from Andrews was solar & wind “normalised to satisfy all demand over the course of a year”. In other words, the AVERAGE demand, not PEAK demand.
If you had normalised it to satisfy PEAK demand you would have an installed capacity that would produce an excess of power throughout the year. California could make a profit selling this excess to other states.
It is my opinion that all these green politicos will be tossed out of office before any of the above takes place to any great extent. [starting with Newsom]
New sensible politicians will reverse all the nonsensical laws.
The madness isn’t confined to California. Here in the UK they plan:
* to reduce CO2 emissions by78% of 1990 levels by 2050
* eliminate all gas and oil-fired heating by 2030
* have all 33 millon vehicles electric by 2035
^ plant more than a billion trees by 2050
These aren’t just pious hopes – much of it enshrined in law.
They’re good with vaccinations, but lousy with maths.
Let’s consider “have all 33 million vehicles electric by 2035.” This would be total replacement since there are now almost 33 million vehicles. The typical cost of the less expensive electric vehicles in the UK is around 21,000 pounds. The medium annual house hold income in the UK is 23,256 pounds. So the expectation is to have families spending most of their yearly income to buy an electric vehicle. I will also point out that 23,256 pounds is the medium income. There are a large number of families at or below 15,000 pounds. Yes Aido, the inability to do math is not confined to California.
Net Zero is just the beginning. The abandonment of fossil fuels is the bigger picture. This would destroy agricultural production and distribution. Mass famine is a very real possibility, even in moderate climates.
Net Zero alone, though, will still cause massive problems, beyond even the ridiculous direct economic cost of such a proposal. Even the indirect cost will cripple the economy and create untold hardship.
One may only hope the economic cost magically disappears into some hard left fairy garden. Yet, that will still not solve the problems. All those solar panels, wind turbines and batteries need to go somewhere. That’s often on valuable agricultural land or in areas of conservation value. The mining required for their production is never really mentioned. Nor is the waste disposal problem once their usable life is up.
Blackouts will occur. In cold climates especially, lack of power could easily constitute a serious health crisis. While people freeze, hospitals shall need to ramp up their diesel generator capacity to get their patients through, but what happens when the patients go home? Heat shall also be deadly. Water supplies will be threatened and food will spoil.
Of course, all this will be disputed. The responses that are received are typically driven by emotion, even those that purport to represent science. The South Australian experience is one of denial, not by ‘climate deniers’, but by those who think spending more than we have on wind turbines, solar panels and very big batteries is a workable solution to a non-problem. If we follow their lead, Dystopia is coming, under the guise of Utopia.
Net Zero is the net zealots shall entrap us with.
More on the futility of net zero and the futility of regional climate heroism.
https://tambonthongchai.com/2021/02/23/renewable-energy-statistics/
As the article pointed out, the issue of GW vs GWh seems to be over looked. Southern Australia’s 50 million dollar battery did have the giga watts to run their power grid, but only for a few minutes. That is an issue of giga watt hours. Considering the incompetence of the people making the decisions in California, this can only end in one way. Power outages will become a routine part of life. When it comes to power outages most of us think in terms of our homes. This can be really bad for food spoilage and heat. Perhaps more important, for certain industries routine power outages will have a severe impact.
From the article, “and have it crash and burn quickly for all to see and learn from.” I wish this was right. However, liberals are incapable for learning from the mistakes of others if in doing so it undermines their political agendas.
Yeah David, as I was reading this article I kept wondering when GWH would come up. But then how many politicians and those in the media have any clue about this. And as you say, the left won’t learn even after destroying our economy.
Given the price tag just for California which overall has a temperate climate imagine what it would cost in the northern states where winters are long and very cold. And how many GWH would be needed to provide electricity when the winter hours of daylight are very short, clouds are very common, and during the coldest weather the wind is also not blowing. As we used to say when I worked nuclear power in the ’70s about environmentalists: Let the b-stards freeze in the dark! Instead they are determined to make us do that.
The Net Zero Intelligence and Common sense coming out of Sacramento Newsom is a total idiot and thats why he needs to be recalled
I believe there are plenty of folks in California that know this whole direction of the energy system is completely WRONG. My guess is with the political climate as fully endorsed by a complicit media, sane voices have been “beat down” and just prefer to stay down in their foxholes. In his 2012 book “Power Hungry,” sadly, Robert Bryce made a keen observation. The reason we cannot have a thoughtful, well informed debate on a national energy policy is that the vast majority of Americans are “fundamentally scientifically & mathematically illiterate.” Unfortunately, all this ends badly. Aspiration & dreams will prove of little VALUE when you run up against the hard realities of energy imperatives. Looks like this lesson will be learned the HARD WAY…
As you well know this plan is totally ludicrous because it would NEVER work. Even if money were no object there’s no way in hades could they construct enough wind turbines and solar panels to generate the needed electricity. Add to that the monstrous number of batteries needed. All of these need an incredible amount of fossil fuels to mine, process, manufacture, ship and install these monstrosities. And most of these metals are extracted and processed in Communist China.
What a bunch of idiots running the state (and now they are trying to do the same in the rest of the US.