Leen Weijers wow, I knew it was expensive....and impossible, but your analysis is spot on, and needs significant attention. How is it the Biden administration thinks offshore wind, no less, makes any sense...in the mean time we are destroying our marine habitats for useless generation that is not going to show up on time and when needed at an incredibly high expense to the rate payers. #wind #intermittent #costprohibitive #notgreen #unreliable #thermodynamics #secondlaw
When Lazard calculated how wind power cost change by “firming” it with battery backup, it grossly underestimated wind’s intermittency and its impact on Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE). I reviewed 2022 wind power data for Texas, as measured by ERCOT, to determine what battery it would take to ensure that 34% (TX wind capacity factor) of the nameplate 35 GW wind capacity works 95% of the time. Sorry, that is a complicated way to ask for 12 GW of wind power to work as reliably as a nuclear, coal or natural gas power plant. TX wind misses the required 12 GW 45% of the time with its current ~10 GWh storage backup. In what Lazard calls "firmed" wind power with 4-hr of battery backup, wind power under-delivers 35% of all time. To decrease the power shortcoming to only 5% requires a whopping 7 TWh in battery storage. That’s 700x the size of today’s battery system and increases wind power LCOE 30x from about $40/MWh to 1,200/MWh. There are other ways to ensure reliable power at low cost, but cheap & reliable wind power is an oxymoron. https://lnkd.in/eyHFC6CC #renewables #batterystorage #windenergy #energytransition #LCOE
Owner, Thomson Engineering, Inc.
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