Connect with us
[bsa_pro_ad_space id=12]

Energy

One (Megawatt) is the loneliest number, but hundreds of batteries are absurd

Published

5 months ago

12 minute read

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Brian Zinchuk

That comes out to $104,000,000,000, in batteries, alone, to cover those 18 hours on Feb. 8. To make it easier on you, $104 billion. If you use Smith’s numbers, it’s $80.6 billion. Even if I’m out by a factor of two, it’s an obscene amount of money.

SaskPower Minister Dustin Duncan recently told me I watch electricity markets like some people watch fantasy football. I would agree with him, if I knew anything about fantasy football.

I had some time to kill around noon on Feb. 8, and I checked out the minute-by-minute updates from the Alberta Electric System Operator. What I saw for wind power production was jaw-dropping to say the least. Alberta has built 45 wind farms with hundreds of wind turbines totalling an installed capacity of 4,481 megawatts.

My usual threshold for writing a story about this is output falling to less than one per cent – 45 megawatts. Its output at 11:07 a.m., Alberta time, in megawatts?

“1”

Ten minutes later:

“1”

30 minutes later:

“1”

How long can this last? Is there a fault with the website? There doesn’t seem to be.

12:07 p.m.

“1”

Strains of “One is the loneliest number” flow through my head.

I’ve seen it hit one before briefly. Even zero for a minute or two. But this keeps going. And going. I keep taking screenshots. How long will this last?

1:07 p.m.

“1”

1:29 p.m.

“1”

Finally, there’s a big change at 2:38. The output has doubled.

“2.”

That’s 2.5 hours at one. How long will two last?

3:45 p.m.

“2”

4:10 p.m. – output quadruples – to a whopping eight megawatts.

It ever-so-slowly crept up from there. Ten hours after I started keeping track, total wind output had risen to 39 megawatts – still not even one per cent of rated output. Ten hours.

It turns out that wind fell below one per cent around 5 a.m., and stayed under that for 18 hours.

Building lots of turbines doesn’t work

The argument has long been if it’s not blowing here, it’s blowing somewhere. Build enough turbines, spread them all over, and you should always have at least some wind power. But Alberta’s wind turbines are spread over an area larger than the Benelux countries, and they still had essentially zero wind for 18 hours. Shouldn’t 45 wind farms be enough geographic distribution?

The other argument is to build lots and lots of batteries. Use surplus renewable power to charge them, and then when the wind isn’t blowing (or sun isn’t shining), draw power from the batteries.

Alberta has already built 10 grid-scale batteries. Nine of those are the eReserve fleet, each 20 megawatt Tesla systems. I haven’t been able to find the price of those, but SaskPower is building a 20 megawatt Tesla system on the east side of Regina, and its price is $26 million.

From over a year’s frequent observation, it’s apparent that the eReserve batteries only put out a maximum of 20 megawatts for about an hour before they’re depleted. They can run longer at lower outputs, but I haven’t seen anything to show they could get two or five hours out of the battery at full power. And SaskPower’s press release explains its 20 megawatt Tesla system has about 20 megawatts-hours of power. This corresponds very closely to remarks made by Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, along with the price of about $1 million per megawatt hour for grid-scale battery capacity.

She said in late October, “I want to talk about batteries for a minute, because I know that everybody thinks that this economy is going to be operated on wind and solar and battery power — and it cannot. There is no industrialized economy in the world operating that way, because they need baseload. And, I’ll tell you what I know about batteries, because I talked to somebody thinking of investing in it on a 200-megawatt plant. One million dollars to be able to get each megawatt stored: that’s 200 million dollars for his plant alone, and he would get one hour of storage. So if you want me to have 12 thousand megawatts of storage, that’s 12 billion dollars for one hour of storage, 24 billion dollars for two hours of storage, 36 billion dollars for three hours of storage, and there are long stretches in winter, where we can go weeks without wind or solar. That is the reason why we need legitimate, real solutions that rely on baseload power rather than fantasy thinking.”

So let’s do some math to see if the premier is on the money.

If you wanted enough batteries to output the equivalent of the 4,481 megawatts of wind for one hour (minus the 1 megawatt it was producing), that’s 4480 megawatts / 20 megawatts per battery = 224 batteries like those in the eReserve fleet. But remember, they can only output their full power for about an hour. So the next hour, you need another 224, and so on. For 18 hours, you need 4032 batteries. Let’s be generous and subtract the miniscule wind production over that time, and round it to 4,000 batteries, at $26 million a pop. (Does Tesla offer bulk discounts?)

That comes out to $104,000,000,000, in batteries, alone, to cover those 18 hours on Feb. 8. To make it easier on you, $104 billion. If you use Smith’s numbers, it’s $80.6 billion. Even if I’m out by a factor of two, it’s an obscene amount of money.

But wait, there’s more!

You would also need massive amounts of transmission infrastructure to power and tie in those batteries. I’m not even going to count the dollars for that.

But you also need the surplus power to charge all those batteries. The Alberta grid, like most grids, runs with a four per cent contingency, as regulated by NERC. Surplus power is often sold to neighbours. And there’s been times, like mid-January, where that was violated, resulting in a series of grid alerts.

At times when there’s lots of wind and solar on the grid, there’s up to around 900 megawatts being sold to B.C and other neighbours. But for 18 hours (not days, but hours), you need 4,000 batteries * 20 megawatt-hours per battery =  80,000 megawatt hours. Assuming 100 per cent efficiency in charging (which is against the laws of physics, but work with me here), if you had a consistent 900 megawatts of surplus power, it would take 89 hours to charge them (if they could charge that fast, which is unlikely).

That’s surplus power you are not selling to an external client, meaning you’re not taking in any extra revenue, and they might not be getting the power they need. And having 900 megawatts is the exception here. It’s much more like 300 megawatts surplus. So your perfect 89 hours to charge becomes 267 hours (11.1 days), all to backfill 18 hours of essentially no wind power.

This all assumes at you’ve had sufficient surplus power to charge your batteries, that days or weeks of low wind and/or solar don’t deplete your reserves, and the length of time they are needed does not exceed your battery capacity.

Nor does it figure in how many years life are you going to get out of those batteries in the first place? How many charge cycles before you have to recapitalize the whole fleet?

For the dollars we’re talking here, you’re easily better off to four (or more) Westinghouse AP-1000 reactors, with 1,100 megawatts capacity each. Their uptime should be somewhere around 90 per cent.

Or maybe coal could be renewed – built with the most modern technology like high efficiency, low emissions (HELE), with integrated carbon capture from Day 1. How many HELE coal-fired power plants, with carbon capture and storage, could you build for either $80 billion or $104 billion? Certainly more than 4,481 megawatts worth.

Building either nuclear or HELE coal gives you solid, consistent baseload power, without the worry of the entire fleet going down, like wind did in Alberta on Feb. 8, as well as Feb. 4, 5, 6, and 7.

Indeed, according to X bot account @ReliableAB, which does hourly tracking of the Alberta grid, from Feb. 5 to 11:15 a.m., Feb. 9, Alberta wind output averaged 3.45 per cent of capacity. So now instead of 18 hours, we’re talking 108 hours needing 96+ per cent to be backfilled. I don’t have enough brain power to figure it out.

You can argue we only need to backfill X amount of wind, maybe 25 per cent, since you can’t count on wind to ever produce 100 per cent of its nameplate across the fleet. But Alberta has thousands more megawatts of wind on tap to be built as soon as the province lifts is pause on approvals. If they build all of it, maybe the numbers I provide will indeed be that 25 per cent. Who knows? The point is all of this is ludicrous.

Just build reliable, baseload power, with peaking capacity. And end this foolishness.

Brian Zinchuk is editor and owner of Pipeline Online, and occasional contributor to the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. He can be reached at [email protected]. 

Related Topics:

Todayville is a digital media and technology company. We profile unique stories and events in our community. Register and promote your community event for free.

Follow Author

More from this author
Economy / 9 hours ago

Federal government’s GHG reduction plan will impose massive costs on Canadians

Alberta / 9 hours ago

Alberta awash in corporate welfare

Crime / 10 hours ago

Everything you need to know about the failed assassination attempt of Donald Trump

Economy

Federal government’s GHG reduction plan will impose massive costs on Canadians

Published on July 26, 2024

By

From the Fraser Institute

By Ross McKitrick

Many Canadians are unhappy about the carbon tax. Proponents argue it’s the cheapest way to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, which is true, but the problem for the government is that even as the tax hits the upper limit of what people are willing to pay, emissions haven’t fallen nearly enough to meet the federal target of at least 40 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030. Indeed, since the temporary 2020 COVID-era drop, national GHG emissions have been rising, in part due to rapid population growth.

The carbon tax, however, is only part of the federal GHG plan. In a new study published by the Fraser Institute, I present a detailed discussion of the Trudeau government’s proposed Emission Reduction Plan (ERP), including its economic impacts and the likely GHG reduction effects. The bottom line is that the package as a whole is so harmful to the economy it’s unlikely to be implemented, and it still wouldn’t reach the GHG goal even if it were.

Simply put, the government has failed to provide a detailed economic assessment of its ERP, offering instead only a superficial and flawed rationale that overstates the benefits and waives away the costs. My study presents a comprehensive analysis of the proposed policy package and uses a peer-reviewed macroeconomic model to estimate its economic and environmental effects.

The Emissions Reduction Plan can be broken down into three components: the carbon tax, the Clean Fuels Regulation (CFR) and the regulatory measures. The latter category includes a long list including the electric vehicle mandate, carbon capture system tax credits, restrictions on fertilizer use in agriculture, methane reduction targets and an overall emissions cap in the oil and gas industry, new emission limits for the electricity sector, new building and motor vehicle energy efficiency mandates and many other such instruments. The regulatory measures tend to have high upfront costs and limited short-term effects so they carry relatively high marginal costs of emission reductions.

The cheapest part of the package is the carbon tax. I estimate it will get 2030 emissions down by about 18 per cent compared to where they otherwise would be, returning them approximately to 2020 levels. The CFR brings them down a further 6 per cent relative to their base case levels and the regulatory measures bring them down another 2.5 per cent, for a cumulative reduction of 26.5 per cent below the base case 2030 level, which is just under 60 per cent of the way to the government’s target.

However, the costs of the various components are not the same.

The carbon tax reduces emissions at an initial average cost of about $290 per tonne, falling to just under $230 per tonne by 2030. This is on par with the federal government’s estimate of the social costs of GHG emissions, which rise from about $250 to $290 per tonne over the present decade. While I argue that these social cost estimates are exaggerated, even if we take them at face value, they imply that while the carbon tax policy passes a cost-benefit test the rest of the ERP does not because the per-tonne abatement costs are much higher. The CFR roughly doubles the cost per tonne of GHG reductions; adding in the regulatory measures approximately triples them.

The economic impacts are easiest to understand by translating these costs into per-worker terms. I estimate that the annual cost per worker of the carbon-pricing system net of rebates, accounting for indirect effects such as higher consumer costs and lower real wages, works out to $1,302 as of 2030. Adding in the government’s Clean Fuels Regulations more than doubles that to $3,550 and adding in the other regulatory measures increases it further to $6,700.

The policy package also reduces total employment. The carbon tax results in an estimated 57,000 fewer jobs as of 2030, the Clean Fuels Regulation increases job losses to 94,000 and the regulatory measures increases losses to 164,000 jobs. Claims by the federal government that the ERP presents new opportunities for jobs and employment in Canada are unsupported by proper analysis.

The regional impacts vary. While the energy-producing provinces (especially Alberta, Saskatchewan and New Brunswick) fare poorly, Ontario ends up bearing the largest relative costs. Ontario is a large energy user, and the CFR and other regulatory measures have strongly negative impacts on Ontario’s manufacturing base and consumer wellbeing.

Canada’s stagnant income and output levels are matters of serious policy concern. The Trudeau government has signalled it wants to fix this, but its climate plan will make the situation worse. Unfortunately, rather than seeking a proper mandate for the ERP by giving the public an honest account of the costs, the government has instead offered vague and unsupported claims that the decarbonization agenda will benefit the economy. This is untrue. And as the real costs become more and more apparent, I think it unlikely Canadians will tolerate the plan’s continued implementation.

Author:

Ross McKitrick
Professor of Economics, University of Guelph
Continue Reading

Economy

Kamala Harris’ Energy Policy Catalog Is Full Of Whoppers

Published on July 25, 2024

By

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By DAVID BLACKMON

 

The catalog of Vice President Kamala Harris’s history on energy policy is as thin as the listing of her accomplishments as President Joe Biden’s “Border Czar,” which is to say it is bereft of anything of real substance.

But the queen of word salads and newly minted presumptive Democratic presidential nominee has publicly endorsed many of her party’s most radical and disastrous energy-related ideas while serving in various elected offices — both in her energy basket-case home state of California and in Washington, D.C.

What Harris’s statements add up to is a potential disaster for America’s future energy security.

“The vice president’s approach to energy has been sophomorically dilettantish, grasping not only at shiny things such as AOC’s Green New Deal but also at the straws Americans use to suck down the drinks they need when she starts talking like a Valley Girl,” Dan Kish, a senior research fellow at Institute for Energy Research, told me in an email this week. “To be honest, she’s no worse than many of her former Senate colleagues who have helped cheer on rising energy costs and the fleeing American jobs that accompany them. She doesn’t seem to understand the importance of reliable and affordable domestic energy, good skilled jobs or the national security implications of domestically produced energy, but maybe she will go back to school on the matter. No doubt on her electric school bus.”

During her first run for the Senate in 2016, Harris said she would love to expand her state’s economically ruinous cap-and-trade program to the national level. She also endorsed then-Gov. Jerry Brown’s harebrained scheme to ban plastic straws as a means of fighting climate change.

Tim Stewart, president of the U.S. Oil and Gas Association, told me proposals like that one would lead during a Harris presidency to the “Californication of the entire U.S. energy policy.” “Historically,” he added, “the transition of power from a president to a vice president is designed to signal continuity. This won’t be the case, because a Harris administration will be much worse.”

But how much worse could it be than the set of Biden policies that Harris has roundly endorsed over the last three and a half years? How much worse can it be than having laughed through a presidency that:

— Cancelled the $12 billion Keystone XL Pipeline on day one.

— Enacted what many estimate to be over $1 trillion in debt-funded, inflation-creating green energy subsidies.

— Refused to comply with laws requiring the holding of timely federal oil and gas lease sales.

— Instructed its agencies to slow-play permitting for all manner of oil and gas-related infrastructure.

— Tried to ban stoves and other gas appliances.

— Listed the Dunes Sagebrush Lizard as an endangered species despite its protection via a highly-successful conservation program.

— Invoked a “pause” on permitting of new LNG export infrastructure for the most specious reasons imaginable.

— Drained the Strategic Petroleum Reserve for purely political reasons.

As Biden’s successor for the nomination, Harris becomes the proud owner of all these policies, and more.

But Harris’ history shows it could indeed get worse. Much worse, in fact.

While mounting her own disastrous campaign for her party’s presidential nomination in 2020, Harris endorsed a complete ban on hydraulic fracturing, i.e., fracking. She later conformed that position to Biden’s own, slightly less insane view, but only after being picked as his running mate.

Consider also that while serving in the Senate in early 2019, Harris chose to sign up as a co-sponsor of the ultra-radical Green New Deal proposed by New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. It is not enough that the Biden regulators appeared to be using that nutty proposal and climate alarmism as the impetus to transform America’s entire economy and social structure: Harris favors enacting the whole thing.

As I have detailed here many times, every element of climate-alarm-based energy policies adopted by the Biden administration will inevitably lead the United State to become increasingly reliant on China for its energy needs, in the process decimating our country’s energy security. By her own words and actions, Harris has made it abundantly clear she wants to shift the process of getting there into a higher gear.

She is an energy disaster-in-waiting.

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

Continue Reading

Trending

X