“Power Garage … Can Be Deployed” – Watts Up With That?

Visitor essay by way of Eric Worrall

h/t Dr. Willie Quickly; If Power Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has calculated how a lot will have to be spent on power garage to stabilise a 100% renewable grid, she does no longer appear prepared to percentage.

Why Treasury Secretary Yellen testified that weather replace ‘will have to be addressed’

Grace O’Donnell·Assistant Editor
Mon, October four, 2021, 11:54 PM

Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen not too long ago reiterated her stance that weather replace poses a risk to the U.S. economic system. 

“Local weather replace is an existential risk, and this can be a very top precedence of President Biden’s and of mine to deal with it,” Yellen informed the Senate Banking Committee remaining week. 

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Yellen additionally spoke back to a query concerning the Biden management’s plans to shift U.S. power to be reliant on renewable assets by way of 2035.

“I don’t imagine that the president’s program goes to result in will increase in the price of power,” Yellen mentioned, regarding the gasoline scarcity and top gasoline costs in the United Kingdom and Europe extra widely. 

She added that “on the subject of the United Kingdom, there’s a query of what to do if the solar isn’t out and the wind doesn’t blow, and I imagine there may be garage applied sciences that may be deployed and, you recognize, different method to deal with that, and naturally that must be a part of a plan to change to renewables and cope with weather replace.”

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Learn extra: https://finance.yahoo.com/information/treasury-secretary-yellen-climate-change-135431579.html

Some time in the past I carried out a coarse calculation, general value of wind generators to supply sufficient annual energy, to interchange the present US generator fleet is round $20 trillion.

However the price of battery garage to redistribute the peaks and troughs right into a clean provide all over the yr, by way of my calculation, used to be round $50 trillion. My tough calculation didn’t take seasonal differences in provide and insist into consideration – that $50 trillion handiest buys you 5 days backup, and assumes the batteries have a complete rate in the beginning of the five day “power drought”.

Perhaps my tough calculation is flawed. However hand waving proposed expenditure of the rest like that magnitude simply isn’t excellent sufficient.

US Treasury Secretary Yellen will have to be utterly candid about her division’s inexperienced power era and garage value calculations, her calculation parameters, her expenditure time frame, and provide an explanation for to the American folks how the US will likely be extra financially solid after the US borrows or raises 10s of trillions of bucks, and one way or the other passes the ones prices onto US companies and customers.

President Obama, no matter his faults, used to be fair and impending about what his plan would do to the price of power. The Biden management will have to a minimum of fit President Obama’s candour on what his inexperienced power revolution will do to the power expenses of the American folks.

Correction (EW): h/t TonyL, dk_ – First paragraph mistakenly referred to as Yellen the power secretary.