We now know that the battery storage for the entire American grid is impossibly expensive, thanks to a breakthru study by engineer Ken Gregory. Looking at several recent years he analyzed, on an hour by hour basis, the electricity produced with fossil fuels. He then calculated what it would have taken in the way of storage to produce the same energy using wind and solar power. He did this by scaling up those year’s actual wind and solar production.
Based on his work, which only covered 48 states, our round working estimate of the required storage for the whole country is an amazing 250 million MWh. America today has less than 20 thousand MWh of grid scale battery storage, which is next to nothing.
Grid scale batteries today cost around $700,000 a MWh. For 250 million MWh we get an astronomical total cost of $175 trillion dollars just to replace today’s fossil fuel generated electricity needs with wind and solar. Even the fantastically low cost estimates that some people are proposing puts the cost around the total annual GDP of America. Even worse, if we get the electric cars and trucks the Biden Administration is calling for these astronomical numbers could easily double.
The environmental cost of wind and solar in NetZero - By December 14th, 2022|General Information|174 Comments - Birds, bats, whales, even people pay the price. Cats, the BBC tells us, kill more birds than wind turbines. And they are right.But unlike cats, notes British journalist Matt Ridley, all over the world, the largest and rarest eagles and vultures are dying in significant numbers as a result of wind turbines. — wedge-tailed eagles in Australia, Verreaux’s eagles in South Africa, sea eagles in Norway, and bald and golden eagles in the United States.
Ridley notes that a32-turbine wind power station in Spain kills a vulture every three days – decimating rare populations of griffon, cincerous, bearded, and Egyptian vultures. In California’s Altamont Pass wind turbines kill over 1,000 birds of prey each year. A Norwegian wind power station has reduced the number of sea eagle territories on the island of Smola from thirteen to just five – making local extinction a real possibility................
Tasmanian mega wind farm approved that can’t operate half the year - By Joanne Nova - When does it make sense to build 122 giant industrial turbines that can’t operate for nearly half a year? he EPA has approved Robbins Island Mega Wind Factory in a remote island off Tasmania that will have to stop working for five months of the year so it doesn’t hurt the Orange-bellied Parrot. It will however be able to kill eagles and other birds for the other seven months of the year. Green electrons are revered, Orange-bellied parrots are sacred but our way of life is up for grabs. It’s a cult.
This is infrastructure that only works about 30% of the time anyhow, and now will be reduced to something like 17%. The theoretical capacity will be 340MW in the first stage, supposedly growing to 900MW if they can somehow build the extra 170km transmission lines and perhaps get the taxpayer to help build another undersea cable across the Bass Strait. (If the company was going to pay, why was the Tasmanian government spending $20m on the “business case”?)
It will be one of the largest wind factories in the Southern Hemisphere (the biggest being West of Melbourne), but as Tom Quirk showed years ago, when the wind stops in Tasmania it often also stops in Victoria. So the two giant wind factories with supposedly 2GW of random unreliable power between them will both probably be useless together. In 2019, this mega industrial proposal was the point where the Greens suddenly realized that skeptics were right and wind-farms were ugly bird killers..........
“This is actually one thing we should wholeheartedly support President Biden. He’s talking about eliminating fossil fuels in federal buildings and new construction renovation and existing buildings,” Morano said. “This is the first conservative thing Joe Biden has done. He is going to make federal workers live in a Net Zero world that means when August heat waves hit DC and air conditioning isn’t going to be sufficiently powered by solar, and wind and renewable, bureaucrats are going to be too uncomfortable to think of even more regulations.”
“A less efficient bureaucracy is what we actually want in Washington and I can’t think of anything more distasteful or unpleasant to impose on federal bureaucrats than working in miserably powered buildings by energy that can’t possibly power them well.”
Watch the full segment here.
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