Batteries can't cure
the intermittency
that makes wind and solar
unreliable sources of power.
Utilities are experimenting
with adding batteries to
wind and solar projects.
The battery projects
are trivial compared to
what is needed
to make wind or solar
electricity reliable.
Batteries cannot make
renewables reliable.
Because they cost
far too much.
Even if the
battery price
fell by 90%,
they would
still cost
too much.
The cost of utility scale
battery facilities is more than
just the cost of the batteries.
These are large, complex facilities.
Connecting all of the batteries,
and getting them to work together,
is a big challenge too.
AC-DC-AC conversions
are a big deal.
The U.S. Energy Information
Administration has surveyed
some of the battery facilities.
“U.S. Battery Storage
Market Trends,” May 2018.
The average is close to
$1,500 per KWh --
this is the cost per KWh
of battery storage capacity.
At utility scale,
we're talking about
megawatts,
not kilowatts,
so the battery cost is
$1.5 million per MWh.
$1.5 million per MW
is also roughly the cost
of a wind farm.
A small wind farm
with generating
capacity of 100 MW,
would cost about
$150 million.
Suppose we want
to store enough power
to back up the wind farm
for just one day,
when the wind speed
is too low to generate
any power.
Let’s say we need 100 MW
for 24 hours, or 2,400 MWh.
At $1.5 million per MWh
that is a whopping
$3,600 million, or $3.6 billion !
In short, the batteries
cost 24 times more
than the wind farm.
Under standard conditions
a wind farm produces
no power around 25%
of the time, due to low
wind conditions.
Low wind periods
of up to a week
will happen too.
A week has 168 hours,
so we need 16,800 MWh
of battery storage capacity,
at the enormous cost
of $25.2 billion,
just to make a $150 million
wind farm 100% reliable
if low wind conditions
last for one week.
Battery systems
announced by
major utilities
seldom store even
an hour’s worth
of generated power
( at a great price ).