A Battery-Powered Future? | Power Line

Like a dead frog whose legs continue to kick, the “green” movement marches on, oblivious to the growing realization that the whole thing is at best a mistake, and at worst a scam.

One of the insoluble problems of wind and solar energy is intermittency–the fact that most of the time, neither wind turbines nor solar panels will produce any electricity. What to do? Store electricity from panels and turbines in batteries.

Batteries work, of course. We all use them every day. But they are extremely expensive, and do not exist at the scale that would be required to power an economy. Thus:

Europe’s biggest battery storage project has entered commercial operation in Scotland, promising to soak up surplus wind power and prevent turbines being paid to switch off.

This is a fact that most people don’t know: wind turbines tend to produce electricity when it is least needed. If their electricity isn’t needed, pouring it on to the grid is actually damaging. So wind farm operators are often paid to dump their electricity. This is called “curtailment.”

Zenobe said the first phase of its project at Blackhillock, between Inverness and Aberdeen, was now live with capacity to store enough power to supply 200 megawatts of electricity for two hours.

Two hours? Wind-generated electricity would need to be stored for months to carry over from times of maximum production (spring and fall) to times of maximum demand (winter and summer). At a minimum, a week or two worth of storage would be needed to prevent fatal blackouts under adverse weather conditions. These are the batteries needed to store a modest amount of electricity for two hours:

The good news is, the batteries haven’t spontaneously burst into flame yet. The bad news is, they are ruinously expensive as well as environmentally awful. A commenter on the linked news story has it figured out:

No wonder electricity prices are on an ever rising spiral. Instead of a small number of gas fired power stations giving us 24/7 available power we have this madness. We are building endless wind and solar projects that do not give 24/7 power but do at times over produce power and are paid huge sums to switch off. Hence the arrival of the latest subsidy seekers in the form of battery storage. Massively expensive and massively useless as 2 hours of power in mid winter means little when low wind periods could be 10 days. This is why we need to keep the gas fired stations for back up. This is economy destroying madness.