Renewables must help pay for transmission and their energy storage backup of fossil power plants
Preface. Wind and solar advocates don’t include transmission and backup costs in their net energy calculations. But without fossil backup, the electric grid will come down due to lack of storage. There is almost nowhere left to put pumped hydro storage in the ten states that already have 80% of hydropower, there is only one Compressed Air Energy Storage plant in the U.S. in one of the few salt domes in three states along the Gulf coast that have salt domes (with half of it powered by natural gas turbines), and it would cost $41 trillion dollars to make Sodium Sulfur (NaS) batteries lasting 15 years to back up just one day of U.S. electricity generation (Friedemann 2015).
Mexico is asking renewable companies to pay for transmission and natural gas / coal backup for when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun shining. About time, because this is all a gigantic waste of money if wind and solar can’t stand on their own, a dumb investment when we could have used the money to convert to organic farming, plant more trees, beef up infrastructure and other efforts to prepare for peak oil, coal, and natural gas and the lifestyle that will be forced upon us.
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Garcia, D. A. 2020. Renewable firms in Mexico must contribute to grid backup – CFE chief. Reuters.
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Private renewable energy firms in Mexico should pay for part of the baseload power underpinning the flow of electricity on the grid, the head of the state power company said….Renewable operators had not been pulling their weight in contributing to the infrastructure that sustains them.
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