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Here We Go Again
Here We Go Again “I keep hearing about battery innovation, but it never makes it to my phone.” – Evan Spiegel For those that have been in and around alternative energy research for the better part of long careers, nothing makes the eyes roll harder than loud proclamations of breakthrough advances in battery technology. Consider […]
Clean energy minerals shortage: Who knew it could happen?
Clean energy minerals shortage: Who knew it could happen? The race for so-called green energy has spawned another race, one for the minerals needed to make the devices such as solar panels and batteries that produce, store and transmit that energy. A hitherto largely unchallenged economic idea—that we will always have supplies of everything we […]
Compressed air energy storage (CAES)
Compressed air energy storage (CAES) Figure 1. Potential salt dome locations for CAES facilities are mainly along the Gulf coast Preface. Besides pumped hydro storage (PHS), which provides 99% of energy storage today, CAES is the only other commercially proven energy storage technology that can provide large-scale (over 100 MW) energy storage. But there are just two […]
Climate Wars: IEA Warns Governments To Stockpile Battery Metals
Climate Wars: IEA Warns Governments To Stockpile Battery Metals China’s dominance in green energy technologies are rare earth metal production is very concerning to the International Energy Agency (IEA), who posted a stark warning Wednesday advising western governments to stockpile critical battery metals such as cobalt and lithium. IEA’s warning comes as the next chapter in US-China […]
Utility scale energy storage limited by minerals and geography
Utility scale energy storage limited by minerals and geography Preface. Natural gas is finite, but aside from (pumped) hydropower, natural gas is the main way wind and solar are balanced now. Therefore, a tremendous amount of energy storage will be needed in the future as natural gas declines. The current total energy storage capacity of […]
Renewables must help pay for transmission and their energy storage backup of fossil power plants
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 […]
Germany’s overdose of renewable energy
Germany’s overdose of renewable energy Anti-nuclear hysteria is destroying the environment This is part 2 in a series. Click here to read part 1. Germany now generates over 35% of its yearly electricity consumption from wind and solar sources. Over 30 000 wind turbines have been built, with a total installed capacity of nearly 60 GW. […]
Utility scale energy storage has a long way to go to make renewables possible
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, […]
The Gyle Premier Battery – The Loch Ness Minnow of energy storage
The Gyle Premier Battery – The Loch Ness Minnow of energy storage The Gyle Premier Inn in Edinburgh has just installed a 100kW Li-ion storage battery, enough to power about 70 hair dryers. Rarely in the history of renewable energy has a battery so tiny attracted the attention of so many. Here, based on limited […]
Batteries, mine production, lithium and the “cobalt crunch”
Batteries, mine production, lithium and the “cobalt crunch” Growth in Li-ion batteries depends on a number of imponderables, such as how rapidly the world converts to electric vehicles, how quickly battery manufacturing capacity can be ramped up and where the electricity to power millions of EVs will come from. This post ignores these issues, concentrating […]
Battery storage* in perspective – solving 1% of the problem
Battery storage* in perspective – solving 1% of the problem The energy world is fixated on the “huge” amounts of battery storage presently being installed to back up slowly-increasing levels of intermittent renewables generation. The feeling seems to be that as soon as enough batteries are installed to take care of daily supply/demand imbalances we […]
Blowout Week 204
Blowout Week 204 In this week’s Blowout we continue our recent focus on energy storage, featuring the just-published ACOLA study which claims that Australia can get 75% of its electricity from intermittent renewables with 105 gigawatt-hours of long-term storage, enough to cover demand for all of four hours. We follow with Russia jumping into bed […]
Australia, energy storage and the Blakers study
Australia, energy storage and the Blakers study Roger Young’s recent post focused on the question of whether the energy storage requirements listed in Prof. Andrew Blakers’ study “100% renewable electricity in Australia” were realistic, but at the time no hard numbers on exactly how much storage Prof. Blakers’ scenarios would require were available. I have […]
The Race For The “Holy Grail” Of Renewables
The Race For The “Holy Grail” Of Renewables In February, AES Energy’s Escondido battery storage facility in California was hailed as the largest one to date, with a capacity of 30 MW/120 MWh. Now, Tesla is building a bigger one—100 MW/129 MWh—in Australia. On the face of it, it’s a race for the bigger battery […]
