Let’s face it, lots of people aren’t very good at math, even rather basic math. On the other hand, some people are quite good at it.
If you aren’t very good at math, there are plenty of other things for you to do in life.
My own field of law practice mostly does not require much skill at math, and there a plenty of math-challenged people who are nevertheless very good lawyers.
But some big societal decisions require a certain level of math competence. Some of these decisions can involve multi-hundreds of billions of dollars or even multi-trillions of dollars.
For example, consider the question of whether proposed electricity generation system X has the capability to deliver the amount of electricity a state or region needs, and at the times it is needed.
Answering this question is just a matter of applied basic arithmetic. Given the dollars involved, you would think that when a question like this is being addressed, it would be time to call in some people who could do the arithmetic, or who at least would be willing to try.
Yet when the issue is replacing the generation of electricity by fossil fuels with generation by “renewables,” it seems that the need to believe that the renewables will work and be cost-effective is so powerful that all efforts to do the arithmetic get banished.
I last considered this issue in a post last week titled “California’s Zero Carbon Plans: Can Anybody Here Do Basic Arithmetic?” The answer for the California government electricity planners was a resounding “NO.”
Today, the Wall Street Journal joins the math-challenged club with a front-page story headlined “Batteries Challenge Natural Gas As America’s No. 1 Power Source.” (probably behind paywall)
The theme of the story is that “renewable” energy sources, such as solar, paired with batteries to balance periods of low production are rapidly becoming so cheap that they are likely to “disrupt” natural gas plants that have only recently been constructed:
[T]he combination of batteries and renewable energy is threatening to upend billions of dollars in natural-gas investments, raising concerns about whether power plants built in the past 10 years—financed with the expectation that they would run for decades—will become “stranded assets,” facilities that retire before they pay for themselves. …
But renewables have become increasingly cost-competitive without subsidies in recent years, spurring more companies to voluntarily cut carbon emissions by investing in wind and solar power at the expense of that generated from fossil fuels.
To bolster the theme, we are introduced to industry executives who are shifting their investment strategies away from natural gas to catch the new renewables-plus-batteries wave. For example:
Vistra Corp. owns 36 natural-gas power plants, one of America’s largest fleets. It doesn’t plan to buy or build anymore. Instead, Vistra intends to invest more than $1 billion in solar farms and battery storage units in Texas and California as it tries to transform its business to survive in an electricity industry being reshaped by new technology. “I’m hellbent on not becoming the next Blockbuster Video, ” said Vistra Chief Executive Curt Morgan.
But how does one of these solar-plus-battery systems work? Or for that matter, how does a wind-plus-battery system work?
Can anybody do the arithmetic here to demonstrate how much battery capacity (in both MW and MWh) it will take to balance out a given set of solar cells at some particular location so that no fossil-fuel backup is needed?
You will not find that in this article.
Here’s something that ought to be obvious: solar panels at any location in the northern hemisphere will produce less power in the winter than in the summer. The days are shorter, and the sun is lower in the sky and consequently weaker.
Therefore, any system consisting solely of solar panels plus batteries, where the batteries are seeking to balance the system over the course of a year, will see the batteries drawn down continuously from September to March, and then recharged from March to September.
Do batteries that can deal with such an annual cycle of seasons even exist? From the Journal piece:
And while batteries can provide stored power when other sources are down, most current batteries can deliver power only for several hours before needing to recharge. That makes them nearly useless during extended outages. … Most current storage batteries can discharge for four hours at most before needing to recharge.
OK, then, so if solar-plus-battery systems are about to displace natural gas plants, what’s the plan for winter? They won’t say. The fact is, the only possible plans are either fossil fuel backup or trillions upon trillions of dollars worth of batteries.
But the author never mentions any of that. How much fossil fuel backup? That’s an arithmetic calculation that is not difficult to make.
But the process of making the calculation forces you to actually propose the characteristics of your solar-plus-battery system, which then makes the costs obvious.
How much excess capacity of solar panels and batteries do you plan to build to minimize the down periods? Do you need a solar panel capacity of four times peak usage or ten times? Do you need a battery capacity of one week’s average usage (in GWh) or two weeks or a full month?
The simple fact is that wind/solar plus battery systems would not need any government subsidies if they were cost-effective. The Biden Administration is proposing to hand out many, many tens of billions of dollars to subsidize building these systems.
They are clearly not cost-effective, and not even close. But no one in a position to know will make the relatively simple calculations to let us know how much this is going to cost.
Even the Wall Street Journal can’t seem to grasp the math involved. And President Biden? It’s embarrassing even to ask the question.
Read more at Manhattan Contrarian
I didn’t know Wall Street bowed to anyone. Maybe they should check out China’s economy before bowing … https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1Iu9D5RhqQ
John S, amazing video!
Ironically, much of the energy Industy is basically turning cutting edge companies into buggy whip manufacturers.
We’re indoctrinating a generation of schoolchildren to believe in the lie and fraud that more CO2 is harmful to life on earth. That is a complete lie. It is not only damaging to schoolchildren. It is fifth column damaging to our incredible fossil fuel driven civilization. The reality is far less frightening than far too many fearmongering teachers, “journalists” and politicians would have you believe. More CO2 has been the best gift to the environment in twelve million years – the last time life essential CO2 was this high naturally! Yet far too many schoolteachers, television “journalists” and politicians are completely silent on CO2’s role in life and in the environment! While they spread the lie and indoctrinate another generation of schoolchildren that CO2 drives the climate! Nothing could be further from the truth. A couple of hundred years ago there was another attempt to roll back the industrial revolution by people whose jobs were being replaced by mechanical looms. They were called the Luddites. Today’s new Luddites are trying to tear down our modern civilization because it is based on fossil fuel energy. Which naturally produces the two most important molecules for life on earth when they are consumed – water and CO2. This is a delusional ‘new Luddite’ ignorance of both the biology of CO2 and of CO2’s role in climate on the part of far too many naive schoolteachers, “journalists” and politicians. It is far more regressive than “progressive”. We are carbon-based lifeforms. Every fat, every protein, even our DNA has a carbon molecular backbone. That is as true for the simplest unicellular organism as it is true for Homo Sapiens Sapiens (human beings) and every other carbon-based lifeform that exists on earth (which is EVERY lifeform – every species). More CO2 has made the planet greener, more abundant, and stronger. More CO2 has made life strong enough to begin shrinking our deserts. All life dies without CO2. Life is entirely dependant on CO2 for its existence! All of life’s carbon molecular backbone, all of life’s energy, and all of our atmospheric oxygen depend on a healthy level of CO2 in the atmosphere. Our lives quite literally depend on CO2. And CO2 has been naturally and dangerously declining from life luxuriant levels of 9,000ppm at life’s birth, to within 30ppm of life’s death at 100-150ppm. The most exciting progress in the biological sciences has been a better understanding of the indispensable interrelationships in the great web of life on earth – ecology. Both between lifeforms – as in the Animal Kingdom’s complete dependence on plants and unicellular organisms to exist. And between lifeforms and the nonliving parts of our environment such as water, atmospheric CO2, and O2. (Animals can’t absorb their own carbon like plants can, they have to eat it. Animals can’t transform sunlight into biochemical energy like plants can, they have to eat their energy, all of which is based on plants and animals that eat plants. Animals depend on oxygen to breathe, all of which came from O2 generating green photosynthetic life. Life was born in the earth’s anaerobic atmosphere (without oxygen) that existed about 3.8 billion years ago. It took oxygen-generating photosynthetic unicellular organisms a couple of billion years to first saturate all of earth’s surface iron (into iron oxides) before those little oxygen generators could begin building our 20% oxygen atmosphere so necessary to animal life on earth. A rational approach to energy does require attention to math and economics. But what is most lacking is not math – but educational and scientific integrity and simple logic. Understandable by anyone. Modern civilization has made us the best fed, longest-living, most prosperous human beings that have ever lived. Because we are an energy-based civilization. Previous civilizations existed because of the invention of farming. They allowed an incredible 10% of the population to lead, and keep secure the 90% occupied in farming. Our fossil fuel energy-based modern civilization allows only 3% of the population to not only feed the other 97%. It allows N. America to provide the majority of export based food to the entire world! The idea that solar and wind can replace fossil fuels is ridiculous on the face of it. Wind and solar are useless on the grid. Because the wind doesn’t always blow, and the sun doesn’t always shine. Any fool is capable of understanding this. While Germany’s Angela Merkel ignored the hundreds of scientists that warned her wind wouldn’t work. Instead, she drove German energy costs to be among the three most highest in the world by foolishly pushing wind energy rather than sticking with coal. And in the process tripled energy costs over ours in Canada. And contributed to the regressive public policy of forcing fully one-fifth of the poorest and elderly Europeans to have to choose between heating – and eating. Barbaric. Eventually she gave up on her wind obsession and followed Trump’s success with natural gas. And the most striking of all? The overwhelming evidence is that CO2 is a follower of temperature changes, not a cause. Eight hundred thousand years of ice core data is unequivocal – temperature changes lead CO2 level changes (by about eight hundred years). Why? Because CO2 solubility is temperature-related. As water temperatures increase, CO2 outgasses into the atmosphere – and vice versa. Proving that CO2 does not cause the temperature to change in the environment – rather CO2 level change is the RESULT of temperature change. And the physics of CO2’s warming effect? It’s partially true but grossly exaggerated. CO2 is essential to life and insignificant to the climate. You’d think even television scientists could understand that. CO2’s warming effect is about one-twentieth of that of water vapor, and even that disappears with the atmosphere’s natural levels of CO2. Hardly setting the earth on fire, as television CO2 driven climate fanatics suggest. CO2’s warming effect is not only far weaker than schoolchildren and television audiences are told. CO2’s warming effect does not increase with CO2 concentration. It virtually disappears after the first 100ppm of natural CO2 levels! The physics of CO2 warming does not increase equally with each 100ppm increment. It tails off to practically nothing before man made levels of CO2 even exist! That is the science of CO2 – in life on earth – and in CO2’s insignificant role in warming from those that have an understanding – and have the courage to speak it. Here’s Candace Owens’s endorsement. Way to go Candace! Thank you for your courage and integrity! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVIjOejFfRc
The article said that the first question social planners should have asked is if renewable energy was cost effective. That is the second that should have been asked. The first one is “do we have a need to use renewables?” With the earth warming at the lower end of the climate model projections, extreme weather events not increasing, higher levels of CO2 greening the earth, and sea level continuing its slow rise, the answer is renewables are not needed.
If as the Wall Street Journal claims renewables plus batteries “Challenge Natural Gas As America’s No. 1 Power Source,” are true, then let it be. Make the subsidies for solar-plus-battery systems no greater than that for natural gas, and let the free market decide.
From the article, “The fact is, the only possible plans are either fossil fuel backup or trillions upon trillions of dollars worth of batteries.” He forgot to mention the most likely option. Power outages will become a normal part of life.
The “News” pages of the WSJ have become no better than the NY Times or Washington Post for being left-wing opinion pieces. If it wasn’t for the actual Opinion Pages and mostly the Financial Pages I’d have dropped the Journal years ago. This “article” is one more example of that.
The biggest irony would be for Carbon-ion batteries to take over from Lithium-ion in the mobile battery space. Carbon-ion isn’t as juicy as Li-ion, but doesn’t catch fire, doesn’t need tough external casings, and so is lighter, more flexible and so easy to fit into e.g. an existing vehicle!
Basic math 101
https://tambonthongchai.com/2021/05/18/climate-science-vs-statistics/