Less-unhinged supporters of a Green Utopia sometimes admit that their vision, as it relates to electricity, has a sizable intermittency snag. Wind and solar can’t power the world when it’s dead calm and the sun doesn’t shine.
The solution? Energy storage. You may not know much about it. But you’re paying for it. Soon, you’ll be paying a lot more.
To get caught up, read the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s new report “Utility-Scale Energy Storage Technologies and Challenges for an Evolving Grid.” Well, read until page 38. The GAO’s researchers know who appropriates their budgets, so their technology assessment fails to delve deeply into inconvenient truths about energy storage. For that angle, you’ll need to consult a separate document — one not funded by taxpayers.
First, the GAO’s primer. It dutifully describes the history, operation, advantages, and disadvantages of “pumped hydroelectric storage, lithium-ion and other battery technologies, compressed air energy storage, and flywheels.” Raising “water from a lower reservoir to a higher reservoir and later releasing it through turbines to generate electricity,” for example, has been around for some time. It currently “represents more than 80 percent of U.S. energy storage capacity.” But high “capital costs, market uncertainty, site specific design, and regulatory hurdles” are obstacles. Furthermore, both environmental and safety impacts could prove dicey.
Lithium-ion batteries are another option, but while they’re enjoying phenomenal growth, thermal runaway is proving to be problematic. When battery cells enter “an uncontrollable, self-heating state,” they can induce “explosions and fires.” Hysteria? Tell that to the neighbors of the “largest lithium-ion battery in the world.” Last year Vistra Energy’s facility in Monterey County experienced two meltdowns in a five-month period. Other not-so-minor issues include staying power (the batteries are “not well suited for applications requiring storage beyond 10 hours”) and, um, slavery. (In February, National Public Radio grimly noted that much of the world’s cobalt is mined “by workers laboring in slave-like conditions in the Democratic Republic of Congo.”)
The GAO’s survey will give you the energy-storage basics. For a blisteringly bright analysis of where we go from here, a briefing paper The Global Warming Policy Foundation published in December is as important as the GAO’s guidebook.
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