Finally we have an article from a respected academic institution that highlights the prohibitive costs of going renewable with Li-ion battery storage backup. This article has received minimal publicity on the web, so here we give it a little more by making it our feature story. Then on to OPEC; the oil tanker crisis; Kuwait fracks in Canada; Azerbaijan gas; Rio Tinto exits coal; Russia fuels its offshore nuclear plant; Moorside nuclear in doubt; blackouts in South Africa; Australia’s National Energy Guarantee; peaking plants in Europe; an “alarming collapse” in UK renewable investment; 5,000 UK churches go renewable and how heatwaves increase deaths in UK but decrease them in Spain.
MIT Technology Review: The $2.5 trillion reason we can’t rely on batteries to clean up the grid
The Clean Air Task Force recently found that reaching the 80 percent mark for renewables in California would mean massive amounts of surplus generation during the summer months, requiring 9.6 million megawatt-hours of energy storage. Achieving 100 percent would require 36.3 million. The state currently has 150,000 megawatt-hours of energy storage in total, mainly pumped hydroelectric storage with a small share of batteries.
Building the level of renewable generation and storage necessary to reach the state’s goals would drive up costs exponentially, from $49 per megawatt-hour of generation at 50 percent to $1,612 at 100 percent. And that’s assuming lithium-ion batteries will cost roughly a third what they do now. Similarly, a study earlier this year in Energy & Environmental Science found that meeting 80 percent of US electricity demand with wind and solar would require either a nationwide high-speed transmission system, which can balance renewable generation over hundreds of miles, or 12 hours of electricity storage for the whole system. At current prices, a battery storage system of that size would cost more than $2.5 trillion.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The California Air Resources Board (CARB) recently published its 2018 inventory of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, according to which the state achieved its goal of cutting GHG emissions below 1990 levels in 2016, four years in advance of the 2020 target date*. Gov. Jerry Brown claims that this proves that the state’s anti-carbon laws and regulations are “succeeding”, but are they really? Here we take a brief look at CARB’s data, concluding a) that success has not yet been achieved and b) that California’s long-term emissions targets remain as elusive as ever.
The National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) was launched by then-chancellor George Osborne in October 2015 to “think dispassionately and independently about Britain’s long-term infrastructure needs in areas like transport, energy, communication, flood defence and the like.” Well, the NIC has now thought dispassionately and independently about energy and has concluded that the UK can meet its 2050 decarbonization goals with either a mostly nuclear or mostly renewable generation mix, but that “wind and solar could deliver the same generating capacity as nuclear for the same price, and would be a better choice because there was less risk”. Here we take a brief look at this renewables-beats-nuclear option to see whether it might work.
As expected, the £1.3 billion Swansea Bay tidal lagoon project was finally rejected by the UK government a few days ago. The question, however, is not why the project was rejected, but how it got this far in the first place. As reviewer 
The just-issued 
In late February 2018 high pressure over the North Atlantic and low pressure over the Mediterranean combined to generate a strong easterly airflow that brought Siberian temperatures to Western Europe, increasing heating demand to the point where there was a shortage of natural gas. The outcome was an increase in UK coal generation, partly because coal briefly became cheaper than gas as a source of electricity generation but mostly because the UK did not have enough gas in storage to fill both home heating and electricity generation needs. The UK, however, plans to shut down all its coal plants by 2025, and in this post I speculate as to what might have happened if they had all been shut down in 2018. The conclusion is that the UK would not have been able to cover peak load deficits during much of the cold period owing to inadequate gas supplies and installed gas capacity.
BP and the International Energy Agency (IEA) measure the contribution of renewables to the global energy mix in terms of primary energy consumed while the World Bank estimates it in terms of final energy consumed. All three give different results, with BP estimating a total renewables contribution of 9.5% in 2015 compared to IEA’s 13.7% and the World Bank’s 18.1%. The BP/IEA differences become larger when contributions are segregated by source (BP estimates almost three times as much energy from hydro as as IEA and IEA estimates four times as much energy from “other renewables” as BP). This post documents these discrepancies while making no attempt to say who is right and who is wrong – that would have to be the subject of another post. But it does raise the question of whether we really know how large a contribution renewables are making to the world’s energy mix.
After about 15 years in planning, the long awaited and largely hated Aberdeen Bay wind farm has taken shape in recent weeks. I seem to recall early reports saying that the turbines, located on the horizon, would be barely visible from shore. Well that was a lie. The huge towers completely dominate the once unspoiled and beautiful scenery of Balmedie Beach. Those who see this as environmental protection have sick minds. And President Trump, who owns a golf course not far away, and who fought this project in the courts, is going to be mighty angry.
A group of geologists have drawn my attention to the 2010/2013 
On April 17, 2018, California Governor Jerry Brown 
Like a number of other remote island communities, The Cook Islands have decided to get rid of expensive diesel power and go to 100% solar within the next few years. To do this they are constructing solar arrays backed up with small amounts of Li-ion battery storage which they believe will overcome the solar intermittency problem. Once again, however, the planners have failed to recognize the prohibitive amounts of battery storage that will be required, and their plans are doomed to fail as a result. The only approach that has any chance of succeeding is to minimize storage requirements by installing far more solar capacity than is needed to meet demand (“overgeneration”), but this approach has problems of its own. (Inset- Rarotonga, the largest and most populous of the Cook Islands).
In my recent 
The big news this week is Trump’s re-imposition of sanctions on Iran, which will cut Iran’s oil production to the point where, combined with cratering oil production from Venezuela, it could cause another oil price spike. We follow with our usual mix – more on Iran, Venezuela and OPEC; oil in Norway; gas pipeline constraints in Europe; Japan moves to coal; British Columbia misses its renewables target; stalemate at the Bonn Climate Conference; California to mandate rooftop solar on new houses; Tesla’s 1GW battery; hydrogen storage in UK; the Swansea Bay tidal standoff; more cracks at Hunterston and how the ravages of climate change threaten historical records.
Recent renewable energy auctions in a number of countries have been won by record low solar and wind bids – proof, according to some media sources, that wind and solar are already cheaper than fossil fuels. This post addresses the question of whether these low bids are realistic and concludes that they probably aren’t. But a detailed assessment of why they aren’t – and why wind and solar auction bids vary so much from country to country – is beyond the scope of a single blog post. Correspondents who can supply country-specific details on these questions are encouraged to provide them.
