New York And California Getting Totally Lost With Energy Storage

For a number of years, I’ve been observing demands of activists and promises of politicians that we transition our electrical grid to being supplied mainly by the intermittent renewables, wind and solar, with all large dispatchable sources (fossil fuel and nuclear) banished. Early on, I thought it was obvious that such a transition would inevitably mean that the only way to make the grid function full-time would be energy storage — on a vast scale never before contemplated or attempted.

How much storage, and at what potential cost? This is actually an arithmetic problem, somewhat cumbersome but conceptually very elementary, and easily done with today’s widely-available spreadsheet programs. To help matters along, in December 2022 I produced my energy storage Report (“The Energy Storage Conundrum”), laying out the main options and the calculations involved. My conclusion was that I could not see any way that this could be done at remotely feasible cost. (Anybody who disagrees is welcome to prove me wrong.) Today, if somebody wants to effect an energy transition in a state or country, they can just look to my Report to quickly understand the nature and extent of the energy storage challenge.

What has actually occurred since December 2022 is that our “climate leader” jurisdictions — in the U.S., that would be New York and California — have moved forward with energy storage proposals that any moron can easily see will not work. Both states are in the process of spending huge sums of money on storage capacity that is so small as to be meaningless to address the problem, and at the same time not technically capable of meeting the challenge no matter the cost. Naturally, the federal government is also involved to pick up a big chunk of the wasted cost from its infinite pile of money.

As to New York, a reader sends me a link to this June 2023 federal Department of Energy letter to the New York bureaucrats, approving a loan guarantee for construction of a 300 MW battery storage facility for grid backup. The facility in question is proposed to be placed on some large barges and anchored in the East River in the bay that once was the site of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. In some respects 300 MW is a very large battery storage facility. These are 4-hour duration batteries, so we are talking 1200 MWh of storage. My Report had a picture of a 150 MWh battery storage facility then under development in Queensland, Australia:

This one for New York would be eight times bigger! But would it be a meaningful amount of storage for backing up wind and solar generation? No. My report found, based on calculations from various jurisdictions, that about a month’s worth of storage would be the minimum needed to get through a full year without running out of power. A (30 day) month is 720 hours. New York State’s average electricity demand (from a 2023 NYISO Report linked in my previous post) is about 17,000 MW. So the 1200 MWh battery provides storage to back up the grid for — about 4.2 minutes. To get your 720 hours of backup, you will need about 10,200 of them. Bloomberg NEF gives the average 2024 price of a lithium ion battery as $150 per kWh. So this one 1200 MWh facility will run about $180,000,000 for the batteries alone. (Note that they are putting the batteries on barges and dredging the harbor to make it deep enough to anchor them there. Without doubt the final cost will be well more than double the $180 million.). 10,200 of these at the highly optimistic $180 million each will run close to $2 trillion.

Nobody in New York government is making these simple calculations. Instead, they forge ahead undeterred, without any idea how much storage is needed or how it is going to work or how much it will cost. This August 2023 article from Canary Media says that the Governor has set a goal of 6000 MW of battery storage by 2030:

[Governor Hochul] is pushing to increase the state’s battery storage capacity from about 300 megawatts today to 6,000 megawatts in 2030, to complement an expansive buildout of renewable generation.

As always, they speak of the wrong units, MW instead of MWh. But if these are the usual 4-hour batteries, 6000 MW would be 24,000 MWh. Now we’re up to about an hour and 25 minutes of storage for the State, versus a basic requirement of 720 hours. And that paltry amount will run us (at $150/kWh) at least $3.6 billion.

And California is no more numerate. Here’s a Los Angeles Times piece from October 2023 with figures on California’s plans for battery storage to back up its wind/solar-based grid:

If California is going to meet its ambitious goals to transition from electricity using fossil fuels, the state will need energy storage to shoulder a significant amount of the load. . . . Four years ago, the state counted a mere 250 megawatts of battery storage available to the California Independent System Operator, which manages the grid for 80% of the state and a small part of Nevada. By the end of this year, that number is expected to grow to 8,000 megawatts. And the amount of battery storage integrated fully into the grid is expected to increase to 19,500 megawatts by 2035 and 52,000 megawatts by 2045.

Once again, it’s the usual MW instead of MWh. But assume that that 52,000 MW in 2045 will be 4-hour duration batteries, so 208,000 MWh. At $150/kWh, that will cost California a cool $31.2 billion. And how long will that last if it starts fully charged and the wind is calm at night? This federal Department of Energy webpage gives California’s current annual electricity demand as 259.5 TWh, or 259,500 GWh. Divide by 8760 (hours in a year) and you get average demand of about 30,000 MW. So the 208,000 MWh of storage will last about seven hours. You’ll need about a hundred times that amount — at a cost of $3+ trillion — to get the 720 hours of storage that you will need.

The amounts of storage that they are talking about are so ridiculously inadequate that I won’t even bother getting to the issue of whether these lithium ion batteries can handle the physical task at hand, which in the real world would involve storing energy for a year and more before it is used, without having it drain away. But before closing, I would be remiss not to mention that both the Canary Media and LA Times pieces linked above devote considerable space to the issue of lithium ion battery fires. It seems that in both New York and California, the really tiny amounts of grid-scale battery storage built to date have been plagued by repeated major fires. From New York:

New York state is grappling with how to adjust its ambitious buildout of clean energy storage after fires broke out at three separate battery projects between late May and late July [2023]. . . . First, on May 31, a battery that NextEra Energy Resources had installed at a substation in East Hampton caught fire. . . . Then, on June 26, fire alarms went off at two battery units owned and operated by Convergent Energy and Power in Warwick, Orange County; one of those later caught fire. On July 27, a different Convergent battery at a solar farm in Chaumont caught fire and burned for four days straight.

Funny that these fires don’t seem to be news in the mainstream press. Here from the Canary piece is a picture of the fire at the Chaumont facility:

It’s the same exact story in California — repeated fires at the handful of grid battery storage facilities that have so far gone operational. From the LA Times piece:

[A] persistent problem keeps coming up — fires igniting at battery storage facilities. Most recently, a fire broke out at the Valley Center Energy Storage Facility in San Diego County on Sept. 18 [2023]. Although fire officials said the blaze was put out in about 45 minutes and extinguished by the site’s internal fire prevention system, businesses and the small number of homes within a quarter-mile of the industrial park where the facility is located were evacuated and shelter-in-place orders were in effect within a half-mile of the site. . . . In September 2022, a Tesla Megapack caught fire at a battery storage facility operated by Pacific Gas & Electric in the Northern California town of Moss Landing. No injuries were reported, but California Highway Patrol closed a section of Highway 1 and redirected traffic away from the site for hours.

Just wait until they have 208,000 MWh worth of these things out there.