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Electricity Decarbonization, No Holy Grail By Herbert Inhaber hinhaber@hotmail.com July 13, 2022 Herbert Inhaber was a Senior Research Scientist at the U. S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and a Science Advisor at the Canadian Atomic Energy Control Board. He is a Fellow of the American Nuclear Society, and holds a Ph.D. in physics and mathematics from the University of Oklahoma. The Holy Grail of renewables like solar photovoltaic and wind turbines is some sort of storage, where excess electricity from sunny and windy days is collected when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow. When this happens, backup sources like coal, natural gas and nuclear (although nuclear does not produce CO2) are not needed. Decarbonization of the electricity system would be achieved. Until recently, the major storage for utilities was so-called “pumped storage”, in which excess energy was used to pump water to a lake in the hills. When the potential energy in the water was needed, it flowed down, turning turbines. Unfortunately, there are few places in the U.S. with the right topography for this storage system. Note: John Shanahan, Editor of website: allaboutenergy.net - The Swiss company ENERGY VAULT Enabling a Renewable World, uses the simple idea of lifting solid objects when there is excess energy and letting them down when they need supplemental energy for electricity. This is similar to pumping water uphill to a storage reservoir. This idea has the advantage of not needing a hill with a reservoir and therefore being applicable at many more sites. It is obviously more expensive. It is a question of how far anti-fossil fuel and anti-nuclear power alarmists will go to avoid these reliable and abundant energy sources. Some clues to a potential battery storage system are gleaned from a recent visit by President Biden to a Ford plant, manufacturing thr F-150 Lightning. This is an electric version of the F-150 truck, the best-selling U.S. model for years.
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https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a38552140/2022-ford-f-150-lightning-battery-sp ecs-revealed/ The truck’s battery has a capacity of 98 or 131 kilowatt-hours (kWh), depending on how much you pay. Call it an average of 115 kWh for our calculations. Burning a 100-watt light bulb for 10 hours requires 1 kWh of electricity. The battery’s weight is 1800 pounds, almost a ton. Its cost? Rumors claim it is about one-third of the Lightning’s total, which would make it $15,000 to $20,000. But the exact value is locked in Ford’s vaults. I live in Las Vegas. In 2020, net electricity generation in Nevada was about 40 million megawatt-hours (MWh) (A MWh is 1000 kWh). Las Vegas has about two-thirds of Nevada’s population, so cut that down to about 27 million MWh for Sin City. Las Vegas is generally sunny, but there are overcast days when the wind doesn’t blow. If we assume just one day of close to zero renewable energy being generated., we divide that last number by 365, yielding 74,000 MWh. How many F-150 Lightning storage batteries would be needed to ensure power for one gloomy day? We divide that last number by the batteries’ average capacity, 115 kWh or 0.115 MWh, yielding about 640,000 batteries. And this is for a medium-size city. Big cities on the East Coast often have multiple sunless days. And this does not take into account that universal phenomenon – night. I am assuming here that the Lightning battery is state of the art and highly efficient, which it probably is. What about the batteries’ weight? Multiply 640,000 by 1800 pounds and divide by 2000 to convert it to tons. We get about 580,000 tons. The Empire State Building in New York is about 365,000 tons. So the backup for just one day would weigh about one and one half times that iconic spire. I won’t even try to calculate the financial hit, if the rumors about the Lightning costs are even partially true. The word for prices probably starts with a “b”, not an “m”. Electric utilities aim for no loss of service more than one hour a year. The calculations above show that using battery backup to achieve this when the rest of the system is renewables will not be easy. There are those who think that the glide path to electricity decarbonization, by finding the Holy Grail, will be simple and cheap. The best response is from Desi Arnaz to Lucy in the TV show of the 1950s, “I Love Lucy” when the latter got into trouble: “You’ve got some ‘splainin’ to do”.
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