Utility scale energy storage has a long way to go to make renewables possible
What follows comes from my book “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation” , which is also where you’ll find the references backing up what I’ve written below.
I often get letters from people about energy breakthroughs in biofuels, solar, electric trucks, and so on. This post is about the “record breaking amount of battery storage add in 2018” (go here to read the article).
To enhance your own evaluation of the constant barrage of happy news in the media, here’s why I didn’t get excited or cheered up and go back to thinking the future was bound to be bright and shiny.
First, let’s go over the four possible ways to store electrical energy. We don’t need to store much now, because we still have natural gas, which kicks in to balance solar and wind power (but not coal and nuclear, which are damaged by trying to do this), and for much of the year provides 66% of electricity generation (along with coal), because wind and solar are so seasonal.
So if the grid is to be 100% renewable someday, which it has to be since the 66% of power coming from fossil fuels now to generate electricity is finite, then utility scale energy storage is essential Let’s look at what it would take each of the four methods to store just one day of U.S. electricity generation, 11.12 Terawatt Hours (TwH).
The only commercial way to store electricity is pumped hydro storage (PHS), which can store 2% of America’s electricity generation today. But we’ve run out of places to put new dams. Only two have been built since 1995. There are only 43 PHS dams now, and we’d need 7800 more to store one day of U.S. electricity.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
