The following is an interesting analysis by Francis Menton of the recent Large-scale electricity storage report published by The Royal Society, September 2023.
By Francis Menton • 28 September 2023 • Manhattan Contrarian
If you want to power our modern economy on intermittent renewables (wind and solar), and also banish the use of power from fossil fuels and nuclear, then the only option remaining to make the grid work reliably is energy storage on a massive scale. And then it turns out that energy storage on the scale needed is enormously costly — almost certainly so costly that it will in the end sink the entire “net zero” project.
Failure adequately to address the energy storage problem is the fatal defect of nearly all “net zero” plans that are out there. For an example of a thoroughly incompetent treatment of this problem, you might look at New York’s so-called “Scoping Plan” for its mandated “net zero” transition. This Scoping Plan was issued quite recently in December 2022. As examples of its stunning incompetence, it almost entirely discusses the storage problem in the wrong units (watts versus watt-hours), and regularly posits the imminent emergence of magical “dispatchable emissions-free resources,” that have not yet been invented, to cover the gaps in wind and solar generation. The people who issued this Plan have no idea what they are doing, and are setting up New York for an energy catastrophe some time between now and 2030.
But now along comes a report from The Royal Society addressing this energy storage problem in the context of Great Britain. The Report came out earlier this month, and has been brought to my attention by my colleagues at the Global Warming Policy Foundation. The title is “Large-scale energy storage.”
Having now put some time into studying this Report, I would characterize it as semi-competent. That is an enormous improvement over every other effort on this subject that I have seen from green energy advocates. But despite their promising start, the authors come nowhere near a sufficient showing that wind plus solar plus storage can make a viable and cost-effective electricity system. In the end, their quasi-religious commitment to a fossil-fuel-free future leads them to minimize and divert attention away from critical cost and feasibility issues. As a result, the Report, despite containing much valuable information, is actually useless for any public policy purpose.
On the plus side of the ledger for this Report, the authors use the correct units to calculate the amount of energy storage needed to back up intermittent wind and solar generation; and their arithmetic appears correctly done as far as I have checked. Also a plus is that it takes them almost no time to conclude that there is essentially no possibility that battery technology will ever be able to solve the energy storage problem for a nation’s grid powered by intermittent sources, no matter how much the technology may improve and no matter how much its costs may decrease.
But then there are the negatives. The authors share the conceit of all green energy advocates — and of all central planners everywhere — that their models and projections have anticipated all costs and problems of their massive schemes. And thus, they think, they know all the answers to how this will work, and can dispense with the tiresome need for any physical demonstration project to prove function and cost. And then there is the discussion, or lack thereof, of ultimate cost to the consumer of these grand plans. The treatment of this subject is inadequate, and characterized by what appears to be an effort to divert the reader’s attention from the subject before too many questions are asked.
But let’s start with some pluses. This is from the “Major conclusions” section of the Executive Summary, page 5:
Wind supply can vary over time scales of decades and tens of TWhs of very long- duration storage will be needed. The scale is over 1000 times that currently provided by pumped hydro in the UK, and far more than could conceivably be provided by conventional batteries.
Go to the body of the Report, and you find that the authors have collected data on generation from wind and solar sources in Great Britain over a 37 year period, 1980-2016. Those data show that the intermittency problems of wind and solar generation are far worse than even I had thought. In addition to diurnal and even annual cycles, there prove to be periods of relatively low wind that can persist literally for years. To deal with such situations requires putting huge amounts of energy in storage and then keeping it there for years, maybe decades, in anticipation of these low wind years.
Here is one of my favorite charts from the Report. It depicts the storage balance in a hypothetical 123,000 GWh storage facility for Great Britain over the 37 year period 1980 to 2016. The storage balance never goes much below about 80,000 GWh during the 23 year period 1984 to 2006 — which might have led the incautious to conclude that about half as much storage would be sufficient. But then there was a big low-wind period from 2009-2011:
The authors describe the situation as follows (page 31):
Figure 13 exhibits two striking features. First, a study of the 23 years 1984 – 2006 would have found a storage volume very much smaller than found by studying 1980 – 2016. Second, there is a very large call on storage in the period 2009 – 2011 which reflects persistently low wind speeds that lead to the large deficits seen in figure 2 (some of the energy that fills these deficits would have been in the store since 1980). These features reinforce the conclusion that it would be prudent to add contingency against prolonged periods of very low supply and the possible greater clustering of 2009 to 2011-like years.
As a result of observations like this, the authors, I think correctly, conclude that batteries are completely out of the question to solve this problem. The only storage medium that could conceivably work would be a combustible chemical substance that can be put in massive underground facilities for decades. Only two possibilities are out there — hydrogen and ammonia. And ammonia is far more expensive and far more dangerous. So that leaves hydrogen.
Since hydrogen is the one and only possible solution to the storage problem, the authors proceed to a lengthy consideration of what the future wind/solar/hydrogen electricity system will look like. There will be massive electroayzers to get hydrogen from the sea. Salt deposits will be chemically dissolved to create vast underground caverns to store the hydrogen. Hydrogen will be transported to these vast caverns and stored there for years and decades, then transported to power plants to burn when needed. A fleet of power plants will burn the hydrogen when called upon to do so, although admittedly they may be idle most of the time, maybe even 90% of the time; but for a pinch, there must be sufficient thermal hydrogen-burning plants to supply the whole of peak demand when needed.
I find the treatment of the potential cost of all of this to be totally inadequate. There is never a mention of the most relevant subject, which is how much electricity prices to consumers might increase. The closest thing I find is this chart on page 32:
This is cost “to the grid,” thus wholesale cost. Will there be a huge multiplication of final price to the consumer? At first glance this doesn’t look too bad. About 50 pounds/MWh for the wind/solar input, and then 60-70 pounds/MWh for the storage makes about 110-120 pounds/MWh total. Add about 33% to convert to dollars, and you would have about $143-156/MWh, or 14.3 to 15.6 cents per kWh. It’s high, but not completely in the stratosphere.
But wait a minute. Are these guys leaving anything out?
How about the new network of pipelines to transport the hydrogen all over the place?
How about the entire new fleet of thermal power plants, capable of burning 100% hydrogen, and sufficient to meet 100% of peak demand when it’s night and the wind isn’t blowing.
They use a 5% interest rate for capital costs. That’s too low by at least half — should be 10% or more.
And can they really build all the wind turbines and solar panels and electroayzers they are talking about at the prices they are projecting?
The whole thing just cries out for a demonstration project to prove feasibility and cost. I’m betting that that will never occur before the whole “net zero” thing falls apart from the disaster of skyrocketing electricity prices. Time will tell.
I am certainly no expert but from what I have read and seen allegedly “green” hydrogen produced through electrolysis from unreliable not clean nor green industrial wind turbines to use as storage is not at all the way forward.
I just checked his website and Francis Menton has published the following further report.
My last post discussed a new Report out from the UK’s Royal Society in early September, with the title “Large-scale electricity storage.” The Report describes and models how the UK might build out a “net zero” electricity system for Great Britain. The proposed system would consist of generation entirely from wind and solar sources, with the intermittency backed up only from energy storage and without any use of fossil fuels.
To its credit, the Report dabbles in reality on the subject of how to store sufficient amounts of energy and for a long enough period of time. It considers the various sorts of battery storage that might be used, and concludes that none of them could remotely handle the task at affordable cost. After also considering ammonia as a potential energy storage medium (too costly and dangerous), the Report concludes that the only viable alternative for the storage piece is hydrogen.
Here, from the Executive Summary, is the headline conclusion from the Report:
In 2050 Great Britain’s demand for electricity could be met by wind and solar energy supported by large-scale storage. . . . Meeting the need for long-duration storage will require very low cost per unit energy stored. In GB, the leading candidate is storage of hydrogen in solution-mined salt caverns. . . .
The Report then proceeds to a treatment of the prospective costs of this system. Unfortunately, that treatment of costs is perfunctory and thoroughly inadequate. Ultimate electricity prices to the consumer are not even mentioned. There is brief discussion of how much this system, based on projected costs, would charge as a wholesale price to the grid. However, there are obvious gaps in that analysis (discussed in my prior post), and one commenter suggests that the Report’s guesstimated costs could be off by as much as a factor of ten.
Unlike the authors of this Report, I would not claim to know what the costs of this proposed system might be. But I can see that the proposed system would be very large, very complex, that it has never been tried before, that it has many elements that are novel and will need to be designed from scratch. In the real world, things with these characteristics have a way of costing a multiple of what their proponents claim they will cost.
In promoting that Great Britain should move toward a fully wind/solar/storage electricity system by 2050, the Royal Society is essentially advocating that every one of GB’s 65 million or so inhabitants shall be made guinea pigs for a system that may or may not work and whose unanticipated costs could be enormous. No responsible government would ever go down such a road.
There is an obvious alternative approach: Build a demonstration project to establish feasibility and cost.
Once hydrogen made by electrolysis from water has been selected as the storage medium, it is not difficult to envision what the demonstration project will consist of. Pick a town or region of about 65,000 people, or about 0.1% of the population of GB. For the backup, build a modest-sized thermal power plant for burning the hydrogen (when needed) of about 60 MW nameplate capacity. Then dedicate to the project wind turbines sufficient to generate the entire electricity usage of the 65,000 people over the course of a year, plus all the losses in hydrogen production and storage. This will probably require something like 300 MW of wind turbines (nameplate capacity). The output of the wind turbines will either go to direct supply, or when in excess will feed electrolyzers to make the hydrogen. You will need to procure the electrolyzers, and also create a big enough salt cavern to store hydrogen to cover these people for at least a couple of months in the event of wind drought. Don’t forget the water purification system to make the sea water pure enough to be electrolyzed. And of course add in pipelines to take the hydrogen to the salt cavern and from there to the thermal power plant when needed.
Now you have all the elements to be the equivalent of a dispatchable fossil fuel-burning thermal plant. If it turns out that you have underestimated the amount of hydrogen you need to keep this going all the time, and you need to build facilities to make more hydrogen, well now you know.
I suspect that this system for the size specified could be built for a few tens of billions of pounds. That will be very expensive. But it will be the best tens of billions of pounds you have ever spent, because when it shows that this system costs five or ten times what the existing system costs to produce the same electricity, it will be abandoned. And the people will have been spared decades of impoverishment. And, if it turns out that the system can be built at some modest premium to the current system (unlikely), then at least a rational debate can be had as to whether this premium is worth spending for the slight “climate” benefits.
Meanwhile, there continues to be no demonstration project anywhere in the world of a wind/solar/storage electricity system that can keep the lights on through the year without fossil fuel backup. The Gorona del Viento project (wind turbines and a pumped storage reservoir) on El Hierro Island off Spain fails worse and worse every year. From its website, here is its stated objective:
Gorona del Viento, El Hierro, S.A.´s Wind-Pumped Hydro Power Station is designed to supply the Meridian Island with electrical energy derived from clean, renewable energy sources such as water and wind. The Wind Farm has capacity to fully meet El Hierro´s demand for electricity.
But at the data section of the website, we find this chart:
There are 8760 hours in a year (8784 in a leap year like 2020). So in 2019 they got all of their electricity from the wind/hydro system about 26% of the time. Then that dropped to under 22% of the time in 2020, and less than 15% of the time in 2021. Some time in 2022 they stopped reporting the data. Now they blare out baloney about “tons of carbon emissions saved” while running the backup diesel generator fully 85% of the time.
If anybody thought that the demonstration project I proposed could be built at reasonable cost to make a profit, then multiple entrepreneurs would already be building these things. Meanwhile the costs are buried so no one can figure them out. We have a desperate need for a real demonstration project. UK, you are the one to do it!
Very interesting data on the wide variation in wind over multi-years - thanks for that. There is a massive, yet laughably ironic problem with the idea of producing, transporting, and storing hydrogen (at great expense, I might add) to "burn" (making H2O) for supplemental energy to power the grid - H2O vapor released to the atmosphere causes more warming then CO2! (see "My Two Cents" Aug3, (titled Why Now, Fed Now) which includes a piece about the Hunga Tonga undersea volcanic eruption in Jan 2020)
Very interesting data on the wide variation in wind over multi-years - thanks for that. There is a massive, yet laughably ironic problem with the idea of producing, transporting, and storing hydrogen (at great expense, I might add) to "burn" (making H2O) for supplemental energy to power the grid - H2O vapor released to the atmosphere causes more warming then CO2! (see "My Two Cents" Aug3, (titled Why Now, Fed Now) which includes a piece about the Hunga Tonga undersea volcanic eruption in Jan 2020)