whatyareckon

By David Wojick, Ph.D. ~

The amount of storage needed to make renewables reliable is so huge that even if the cost dropped fantastically we still could not afford it.

We now know that the battery storage for the entire American grid is impossibly expensive, thanks to a breakthrough study by engineer Ken Gregory. Looking at several recent years he analyzed, on an hour by hour basis, the electricity produced with fossil fuels. He then calculated what it would have taken in the way of storage to produce the same energy using wind and solar power. He did this by scaling up those year’s actual wind and solar production.

Based on his work, which only covered 48 states, our round working estimate of the required storage for the whole country is an amazing 250 million MWh. America today has less than 20 thousand MWh of grid scale battery storage, which…