Saturday, January 15, 2022

Calculating The Full Costs Of Electrifying Everything Using Only Wind, Solar And Batteries

For several years now, advocates of "Decarbonizing" our energy system, along with promoters of wind and solar energy, have claimed that the cost of electricity from the wind and sun was dropping rapidly and either already was, or soon would be, less than the cost of generating the same electricity from fossil fuels.

These claims are generally based on a metric called the "Levelized Cost of Energy," which is designed to seem sophisticated to the uninitiated, but in the real world is completely misleading because it omits the largest costs of a system where most generation comes from intermittent sources.

As we now careen recklessly down the road to zero emissions, how much will these omitted costs really amount to? A guy named Ken Gregory has recently come out with a Report at a Canadian website called Friends of Science with the title "The Cost of Net Zero Electrification of the U.S.A." A somewhat abbreviated version of Gregory's Report has also appeared at Watts Up With That here.

Gregory provides a tentative number for the additional storage costs that could be necessary for full electrification of the United States system, with all current fossil fuel generation replaced by wind and solar.

Since the current U.S. annual GDP is about $21 trillion, you will recognize that the $433 trillion represents more than 20 times full U.S. annual GDP. In the post I will give some reasons why Gregory may even be underestimating what the cost would ultimately prove to be.

The conclusion of Andrews's work was that, for those two cases, going to an electricity system of all wind, solar and batteries could drive up the cost of electricity by a factor of approximately 14 to 22.

Where Andrews sought to calculate the cost of using just wind, solar and batteries to supply the currently existing electricity demand for his chosen jurisdictions, Tanton's main focus is on the incremental costs of electrifying all the currently non-electrified parts of the economy in his chosen jurisdictions.

From the Executive Summary: Electrifying the entire nation, with a goal of eliminating the direct consumption of fuel would cost between $18 trillion and $29 trillion in first costs.

Multiply $437/kwh times the 250,000 maximum storage requirement and you get a mere $87 trillion or so of storage costs to just get the existing U.S. electricity system to run all year at current demand.

It's the extrapolation to the rest of the economy that gets Gregory's total storage costs up to the $433 trillion.

Gregory: "The use of S W generation from 48 contiguous states implicitly assumes that there is sufficient unconstrained transmission capacity to share any excess or to cover any shortfall among the states." Again, there could be huge costs here not yet considered.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-1-14-calculating-the-full-costs-of-electrifying-everything-using-only-wind-solar-and-batteries 

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