Excellent summary, EBB.....Wind and solar droughts are too frequent, battery storage duration is too limited, and the cost is too prohibitive to achieve the capacity buildout required. Unfortunately, these facts haven’t stopped organizations from advocating for it and states from passing legislation to enforce it.
The Battery Bubble will pop eventually. The only question is how much money we'll spend before reality catches up with the hype.
Sadly, California has already wasted billions of dollars with the installation of 16,351 MW of 4-hour batteries as of 01 June 2026. California is also distinguished by having the first massive battery fire at Moss Landing in January, 2025. 300 MW of batteries up in smoke. Likely total cost will be about $1/2 billion. Physics is the reason I say the expenditure is wasted.
1. Batteries fail to contribute meaningful amounts of essential synchronous grid inertia like large nuclear power plants do.
2. Furthermore, the short circuit capability for a few milliseconds is orders of magnitude less than nuclear power plants.
3. Finally, batteries are ideally suited for resistive loads with a power factor of 1.00. On the other hand, the dominant load for power grids are electric motors with a power factor of 0.80. That means wasted energy when employing batteries. It is acceptable for household loads with Tesla PowerWalls. However, this inefficiency is unacceptable for a massive power grid.
Finally, batteries are ideally suited for resistive loads with a power factor of 1.00. On the other hand, the dominant load for power grids are electric motors with a power factor of 0.80. That means wasted energy when employing batteries. It is acceptable for household loads with Tesla PowerWalls. However, this inefficiency is unacceptable for a massive power grid.
It is more than wasted energy, although you are certainly correct about that. The Iberian Peninsula grid collapse was a function of the inability of an IBR heavy grid to handle reactive power.
Yes. For additional details regarding the importance of synchronous grid inertia, please see this Substack article which I contributed to: "When the Lights Went Out in Spain — And Why California Should Pay Attention," Brad Panike and Gene Nelson, Ph.D. 31 May 2026. Kilovar Substack. https://kilovar1959.substack.com/cp/200008271
Every article reveals more energy illiteracy, financial illiteracy, and a superior demonstration of political power out of control. The facts are indisputably on eliminating or severely limiting solar and wind and batteries as a feasible and reliable part of the grid. The trillion dollar question is how is this insanity stopped and we course correct to reality. How does your professional work make an impact on this? This article was especially disturbing. 😳
I agree with you, Dave, but I can’t help but wonder if such illiteracy by politicians is indeed illiteracy or a strategy for maintaining their elective office (i.e., keeping the grift going).
It sure is feeling like that. Nobody should be so idealistic that they don’t understand energy and financial literacy for their constituents. Greenwashing is the greatest scam ever, except social security.
I am seeing a transition in batteries from a purely renewable driven device to a market tool completely separate from renewable energy. I am wondering if you have looked at that? They do play well with gas turbines keeping them in optimum heat rate output during lower loads, and reducing ramp stress during super peak. Thoughts?
Agreed!! Data centers can show power demand fluctuations of well over 100 MW six to twelve times a minute as the centers switch from processing to synchronization to transferring to storage. No generator can keep up. Even Li-ion batteries have challenges due to limited cycle amounts. Some are going to Vanadium Flow batteries to solve this issue.
At a recent Industrial Siting Council (ISC) meeting I attended an entity planning some BESS backing up WIND was asking for approval for a modification of their permit. The unstated customer of the power ultimately was assuredly a data center (not a huge one) and the original application for the BESS was for vanadium flow batteries. The modification of the permit was to switch to lithium ion batteries.
A point of almost no discussion was that the fire authorities in this urban area had approved the change just like there is no difference in fire risk with this change. I'm doubtful. But beyond these immediate doubts I worry that all of this energy transition is so complex that the relevant authorities have no idea what they are doing and don't have sense enough to admit so.
In fact, the enabling legislation for our ISC doesn't explicitly permit them to go hire expertise, but depend instead on state agencies alone.
The idea that batteries can lower costs by improving efficiency is a myth because it ignores the role of round trip efficiency that loses a significant amount of the energy used to charge the storage.
I have learned over the last forty years it there is a lot more to the math than just the bottom dollar cost of the energy. That was true before renewables, and it's true now. If you want to just run spreadsheets on the hard cost of energy, generation is too expensive to run, all of it. But we we run it anyway.
Yes, batteries will not save the Grid. People who know and understand energy physics have known this for decades. Wind and solar can only play complementary roles, when they are in surplus. Politicians do not understand energy physics. So, why the hell are they even involved? Because of the green energy activists, whose base vote they covet. Idiocy. Maybe let the energy experts guide your countries energy path, instead of the dipsticks who want the Green New Deal.
The tech boom of the '90s--grounded in Greenspanismo and derivatives and all that fradulent malarkey--left a bunch of people with tons of money that they had to figure out how to spend.
Rightly concerned about sustainability and such they wrongly latched on to badly conceived schemes. (They operated on quarterly and annual funding formulas/tax planning. There was no time to park their billions until the kinks were worked out. "We'll fix it in post.")
I circulated among these people for a good stretch. They had the power to go from somebody's assertion of a bright idea to a funding cycle to creating NGOs or programs within existing institutions to organizing executive branch policy/legislation in a remarkably short time. There was little to no testing of their ideas. It all just...sounded good.
The politician's reward in ego, power, & wealth outweigh any concern about the energy backbone of our civilisation. They will never willingly stop taking bad advice that pays them well.
It seems to me that no weather dependent, intermittent, variable and therefore unreliable energy sources should ever be plugged into the grid. I am no grid or energy expert so my understanding may be off, but here it is anyway. My understanding is that the US grid operates at a frequency of 60hz supported by reliable energy sources (coal, gas, nuclear hydro) with spinning reserves that can react virtually instantaneously when demand spikes causing a drop in the frequency or when demand drops causing an increase in frequency. If the change in frequency is not addressed quickly, then power outages will follow. Putting unreliable and unpredictable energy sources on the grid make grid management more complicated and expensive which increases the probability of power outages. Maybe batteries can help, but it sure seems like an expensive solution to what is otherwise a non-problem if we just keep wind and solar off the grid.
And one more thing - wind and solar are not clean and green when you factor in the full life cycle including the massive amount of mining required to extract the minerals needed using a lot of very heavy fossil fuel powered machinery, transport (to China mostly) for the energy intensive fabrication process (powered mainly by coal), transport to ultimate destination, site prep, site assembly, life cycle maintenance and ultimate decommissioning - each step requires the use of very heavy fossil fuel powered machinery. And, as Ronald Stein frequently notes, wind and solar only generate electricity and can't be used to produce the over 6000 petroleum based products we use in our everyday lives or the transportation fuels we need. How did we get to this level of massive stupidity?
It strikes me that another issue, unmentioned here, is that battery manufacturing is essentially monopolized by China and the idea that the US should add another critical requirement to operate as a nation to the basket of things dominated by Chinese manufacturing (rare earths anyone?) and thus offering the Chinese government additional pressure points to achieve their own goals, which may run counter to those goals of the US, is a REALLY bad idea.
During the recent multiday heat wave in the Virginia area, PJM used all backup power sources to avoid blackouts. KILOVAR reports that batteries provided no energy in the crisis.
The true cost of energy storage is exponential as capacity is added.
This is because storage utilization is seasonal driven by Wind & Solar capacity factors over the year.
This means that to get near 100% W & S, a significant amount of storage will be idle for much of the year. To remain economically viable, the storage must use arbitrage substantially increasing consumer costs.
The same math applies to transmission lines built for remote wind/solar. One must build to the maximum capacity, but the actual usage is below 30%, making it a horribly underutilized and therefore horrendously expensive installation of equipment.
It’s the same battery storage madness here in the UK. The national grid peak demand is currently around 46-48 GW and according to Chat GPT, the UK currently has 7.5 GW of battery capacity with an energy capacity of 11 GWh, which equates to 1.5 hours.
Obviously this will go nowhere in a prolonged cold midwinter Dunkelflaute when power is needed most. Such weather conditions can extend into continental Europe to put the international interconnector supply at risk (43 TWh gross imports in 2025). The battery supply might help during the first daily peak demand period but for a prolonged spell of no wind and no sun it will all have to be recharged before the next peak period while still supplying all the non-battery grid demand. It’s extremely unlikely ever to work and is already costing us a fortune.
According to an FT article of a year ago, “To meet its 95 per cent clean power goal, the government estimates Britain will need about 23-27GW of battery storage by 2030, up from about 6GW now. Over the year to June, applications were submitted for 30GW across 400 schemes.”
Heavy reliance on weather-dependent wind and solar means that blackouts look inevitable, and that’s without considering the added risk that these technologies, including the batteries, lack the inertia of conventional rotating plant to support grid stability (ref. the April 2025 national blackout in Spain that all establishment authorities are steadfastly putting a blind eye to and/or praying that the deployment of synchronous condensers will avoid a recurrence).
I first saw it published on Barry Brook's blog, bravenewclimate.com, back when Brook still managed it. It is sad that it is no longer available there, as the comments section contained several hundred comments, many of which included excellent additional analysis. I think one of Brook's students took up the blog, and has rearranged it to the point where the article and comments are no longer accessible and possibly gone altogether.
Looked it up. Ben Heard, I think, took over the site.
This is very timely work EBBs, as I am beginning to see more BESS backing up utility scale Wind, or maybe its WIND backing up BESS, or maybe it will actually be coal backing up both, out here in Wyoming.
I went to the Morgan Lewis article behind your effort and noted this statement
"As a general matter, many states require utilities to produce integrated resource plans (IRPs) to demonstrate how that utility will be able to meet long-term demand projections using a combination of generation, transmission, and energy efficiency investments while also minimizing costs."
I read lots of IRPs. I know they should provide future guidance but they manifestly do not do so. They actually just archive, implicitly, what people have learned in the past two years since the previous version. Look at how the mix or resources has changed in one version after another. There are absurdities. For example, PacifiCorp places batteries in among the generating resouces and never once admit that, as storage, they are also a new load on the grid; then justify ignoring this by saying that batteries as a load can be ignored because they are needed so infrequently.
I note also that the IRP usually shows energy efficiency as a "resource" but the amounts involved are sometimes fantastic. PacifiCorp as an example once again shows efficiency at the end of the planning horizon (year 2045) nearly equalling 60% of present average load (5,000MW of current 8,000MW load). I can't recall which IRP it was, probably their 2023 version, but Idaho Power Company seemed to recognize the estimate of energy efficiency had gotten far away from reality and made a big adjustment.
Good for them, but it alerted me to the possibility that Demand Side Management was being used to simply get the numbers to work out.
I think that's right, we've noticed the same thing. IRPs have increasingly used load modifying resources as a means of lowering the cost of the energy transition, and even then it's still expensive.
Thanks for explaining the over build. People forget that batteries have to be charged. You have 6 hours a day to gather 24 hours of power supply, in the best of circumstances. That means a huge number of solar panels and double that for clouds, take battery round trip efficiency into account and it becomes ridiculous.
I did a back of the napkin on running a 100 MW data center on solar and batteries. It would take 8 square miles of solar panels and cost $2B. And you’d still need a back up system.
I remember listening to a Decouple podcast with Chris Keefer interviewing Jigar Shah. He came across as an arrogant jerk. PG words cannot begin to express my utter contempt for this man.
I'm with you on the keeping cool issue. Thank goodness we have folks like Keefer and Angwin and several others who can keep their cool and present a sane public face. :-)
Demand flexibility is another term for electricity rationing.
In solar-dominated systems, batteries can spread solar power over 24 hours. That's their limit. Seasonal variations in solar then have to be covered by overbuilding, but trying to overbuild or provide batteries for multiple consecutive cloudy days becomes extremely expensive. That's where the net zero ideology fails. Some dispatchable backup is always needed.
Wind is even more difficult to firm up with batteries. A single wind drought doesn't determine the storage requirement. The maximum need arises from a series of wind droughts with insufficient windy periods in between to charge the batteries. Wind conditions can be below normal for months, with storage requirements in tens of TWh, not GWh.
Jet fuel for the military and international airports, diesel fuel for trucks and construction equipment, different grades of gasoline for vehicles, and bunker fuel for all the ships arriving and departing from Ports.
Wind turbines and solar panels can ONLY generate electricity, under favorable weather conditions but CANNOT make any of the products or transportation fuels MADE FROM oil.
Worldwide infrastructures are dependent on continuous and uninterruptable that wind and solar CANNOT provide.
All the money spent on battery storage CANNOT support the various transportation infrastructures, nor meet the products demanded by hospitals, airports, telecommunications, appliances, electronics, sanitation systems, heating and ventilating systems to support current lifestyles.
Shah is no different than the politicians who, when the winds change, change positions and then say “what, me? I never said that.” Except the internet never forgets. From Grok:
**Jigar Shah on the Need for 100% Renewables**
Here are notable quotes and statements from Jigar Shah (Director of the Loan Programs Office at the U.S. Department of Energy and founder of SunEdison) emphasizing why a full transition to 100% renewable energy is both necessary and achievable:
### **On the Scale of Renewable Resources**
> “The available renewable resource is 100 times that of the Nation’s annual electricity need.”
> *(Emphasizing that solar, wind, and other renewables vastly exceed U.S. electricity demand — we’re only using a tiny fraction of what’s available.)*
### **On Cost and Economic Reality**
> “New solar and wind power now costs at least 50% less than new fossil fuel generation.”
> *(Highlighting that renewables are no longer the expensive option — they’re the cheapest new power source.)*
### **On Clean Energy as the Backbone**
> “Clean energy invests twice as much in America as fossil fuels do. We’re not the underdog anymore — we’re the backbone of new power generation. It’s time to sound like it.”
> *(Arguing that the industry must stop acting like the underdog and own its dominant role.)*
### **On Meeting Growing Demand**
> “If solar and wind doesn’t continue to play a role of 80% of everything added to the grid every year, then we’re not gonna be able to support AI, we’re not gonna support load growth, we’re not going to support economic development, air conditioning…”
> *(Stressing that renewables are essential to power future growth, including AI data centers and electrification.)*
### **On Cities and 100% Renewable Electricity**
> “Cities that haven’t yet switched their municipal electricity to 100% renewable via long-term power purchase agreements are leaving money on the table.”
> *(Pointing out that going 100% renewable is now a money-saving move for municipalities.)*
### **On Political Power and Industry Confidence**
> “We are still 80% of everything that gets added to the grid every year… we are under attack. That means that there is a strategy that we have to put in place to actually make sure that we are building our political power…”
> *(Calling for the clean energy sector to organize and defend its position as the dominant new source of power.)*
These quotes reflect Shah’s consistent message: **100% renewables are not just technically feasible and economically superior — they are essential for meeting future energy demand, cutting costs, and maintaining America’s energy leadership.**
Excellent summary, EBB.....Wind and solar droughts are too frequent, battery storage duration is too limited, and the cost is too prohibitive to achieve the capacity buildout required. Unfortunately, these facts haven’t stopped organizations from advocating for it and states from passing legislation to enforce it.
The Battery Bubble will pop eventually. The only question is how much money we'll spend before reality catches up with the hype.
Sadly, California has already wasted billions of dollars with the installation of 16,351 MW of 4-hour batteries as of 01 June 2026. California is also distinguished by having the first massive battery fire at Moss Landing in January, 2025. 300 MW of batteries up in smoke. Likely total cost will be about $1/2 billion. Physics is the reason I say the expenditure is wasted.
1. Batteries fail to contribute meaningful amounts of essential synchronous grid inertia like large nuclear power plants do.
2. Furthermore, the short circuit capability for a few milliseconds is orders of magnitude less than nuclear power plants.
3. Finally, batteries are ideally suited for resistive loads with a power factor of 1.00. On the other hand, the dominant load for power grids are electric motors with a power factor of 0.80. That means wasted energy when employing batteries. It is acceptable for household loads with Tesla PowerWalls. However, this inefficiency is unacceptable for a massive power grid.
"The only question is how much money we'll spend before reality catches up with the hype."
And how many will burst into flame causing toxic disasters....
You state:
Finally, batteries are ideally suited for resistive loads with a power factor of 1.00. On the other hand, the dominant load for power grids are electric motors with a power factor of 0.80. That means wasted energy when employing batteries. It is acceptable for household loads with Tesla PowerWalls. However, this inefficiency is unacceptable for a massive power grid.
It is more than wasted energy, although you are certainly correct about that. The Iberian Peninsula grid collapse was a function of the inability of an IBR heavy grid to handle reactive power.
Yes. For additional details regarding the importance of synchronous grid inertia, please see this Substack article which I contributed to: "When the Lights Went Out in Spain — And Why California Should Pay Attention," Brad Panike and Gene Nelson, Ph.D. 31 May 2026. Kilovar Substack. https://kilovar1959.substack.com/cp/200008271
Every article reveals more energy illiteracy, financial illiteracy, and a superior demonstration of political power out of control. The facts are indisputably on eliminating or severely limiting solar and wind and batteries as a feasible and reliable part of the grid. The trillion dollar question is how is this insanity stopped and we course correct to reality. How does your professional work make an impact on this? This article was especially disturbing. 😳
I agree with you, Dave, but I can’t help but wonder if such illiteracy by politicians is indeed illiteracy or a strategy for maintaining their elective office (i.e., keeping the grift going).
It sure is feeling like that. Nobody should be so idealistic that they don’t understand energy and financial literacy for their constituents. Greenwashing is the greatest scam ever, except social security.
I am seeing a transition in batteries from a purely renewable driven device to a market tool completely separate from renewable energy. I am wondering if you have looked at that? They do play well with gas turbines keeping them in optimum heat rate output during lower loads, and reducing ramp stress during super peak. Thoughts?
Yes that’s the real use case. Providing power quality attributes for data centers when paired with gas
Agreed!! Data centers can show power demand fluctuations of well over 100 MW six to twelve times a minute as the centers switch from processing to synchronization to transferring to storage. No generator can keep up. Even Li-ion batteries have challenges due to limited cycle amounts. Some are going to Vanadium Flow batteries to solve this issue.
At a recent Industrial Siting Council (ISC) meeting I attended an entity planning some BESS backing up WIND was asking for approval for a modification of their permit. The unstated customer of the power ultimately was assuredly a data center (not a huge one) and the original application for the BESS was for vanadium flow batteries. The modification of the permit was to switch to lithium ion batteries.
A point of almost no discussion was that the fire authorities in this urban area had approved the change just like there is no difference in fire risk with this change. I'm doubtful. But beyond these immediate doubts I worry that all of this energy transition is so complex that the relevant authorities have no idea what they are doing and don't have sense enough to admit so.
In fact, the enabling legislation for our ISC doesn't explicitly permit them to go hire expertise, but depend instead on state agencies alone.
The idea that batteries can lower costs by improving efficiency is a myth because it ignores the role of round trip efficiency that loses a significant amount of the energy used to charge the storage.
I have learned over the last forty years it there is a lot more to the math than just the bottom dollar cost of the energy. That was true before renewables, and it's true now. If you want to just run spreadsheets on the hard cost of energy, generation is too expensive to run, all of it. But we we run it anyway.
This is a very interesting comment! Can you provide references and numbers for this to better quantify it.
Thanks!
I have done a lot of work to understand how energy storage integrates into real-time grids.
Here is a summary of the effect of shifting Nat Gas generation to later in the day using energy storage: https://wrjohn1.substack.com/p/can-energy-storage-reduce-nat-gas
Great analysis.
Sure they can.
Largely by having a smaller capacity of higher utlization CCGT on system instead of a larger quanitity of lower run rate, and higher varibaility OCGT.
The efficiency gap in the base plants is far larger than round trip baytery losses.
Fewer starts on the turbines also help..
I would very much like to see your data proving that the efficiency gains from storing nat gas are higher than the storage losses.
Nothing like real-time hard data to prove your claim.
Yes, batteries will not save the Grid. People who know and understand energy physics have known this for decades. Wind and solar can only play complementary roles, when they are in surplus. Politicians do not understand energy physics. So, why the hell are they even involved? Because of the green energy activists, whose base vote they covet. Idiocy. Maybe let the energy experts guide your countries energy path, instead of the dipsticks who want the Green New Deal.
Nah, it's simpler than that.
The tech boom of the '90s--grounded in Greenspanismo and derivatives and all that fradulent malarkey--left a bunch of people with tons of money that they had to figure out how to spend.
Rightly concerned about sustainability and such they wrongly latched on to badly conceived schemes. (They operated on quarterly and annual funding formulas/tax planning. There was no time to park their billions until the kinks were worked out. "We'll fix it in post.")
I circulated among these people for a good stretch. They had the power to go from somebody's assertion of a bright idea to a funding cycle to creating NGOs or programs within existing institutions to organizing executive branch policy/legislation in a remarkably short time. There was little to no testing of their ideas. It all just...sounded good.
That all snowballed considerably after 2008.
Very interesting, thanks
The politician's reward in ego, power, & wealth outweigh any concern about the energy backbone of our civilisation. They will never willingly stop taking bad advice that pays them well.
It seems to me that no weather dependent, intermittent, variable and therefore unreliable energy sources should ever be plugged into the grid. I am no grid or energy expert so my understanding may be off, but here it is anyway. My understanding is that the US grid operates at a frequency of 60hz supported by reliable energy sources (coal, gas, nuclear hydro) with spinning reserves that can react virtually instantaneously when demand spikes causing a drop in the frequency or when demand drops causing an increase in frequency. If the change in frequency is not addressed quickly, then power outages will follow. Putting unreliable and unpredictable energy sources on the grid make grid management more complicated and expensive which increases the probability of power outages. Maybe batteries can help, but it sure seems like an expensive solution to what is otherwise a non-problem if we just keep wind and solar off the grid.
And one more thing - wind and solar are not clean and green when you factor in the full life cycle including the massive amount of mining required to extract the minerals needed using a lot of very heavy fossil fuel powered machinery, transport (to China mostly) for the energy intensive fabrication process (powered mainly by coal), transport to ultimate destination, site prep, site assembly, life cycle maintenance and ultimate decommissioning - each step requires the use of very heavy fossil fuel powered machinery. And, as Ronald Stein frequently notes, wind and solar only generate electricity and can't be used to produce the over 6000 petroleum based products we use in our everyday lives or the transportation fuels we need. How did we get to this level of massive stupidity?
White liberal women fell for the clean claim. That’s how it happened.
we elected ignorant idiots to make decisions and they make those decisions based on their personal profitability
> we elected
Good one, Queen Victoria.
It strikes me that another issue, unmentioned here, is that battery manufacturing is essentially monopolized by China and the idea that the US should add another critical requirement to operate as a nation to the basket of things dominated by Chinese manufacturing (rare earths anyone?) and thus offering the Chinese government additional pressure points to achieve their own goals, which may run counter to those goals of the US, is a REALLY bad idea.
During the recent multiday heat wave in the Virginia area, PJM used all backup power sources to avoid blackouts. KILOVAR reports that batteries provided no energy in the crisis.
The true cost of energy storage is exponential as capacity is added.
This is because storage utilization is seasonal driven by Wind & Solar capacity factors over the year.
This means that to get near 100% W & S, a significant amount of storage will be idle for much of the year. To remain economically viable, the storage must use arbitrage substantially increasing consumer costs.
The same math applies to transmission lines built for remote wind/solar. One must build to the maximum capacity, but the actual usage is below 30%, making it a horribly underutilized and therefore horrendously expensive installation of equipment.
It’s the same battery storage madness here in the UK. The national grid peak demand is currently around 46-48 GW and according to Chat GPT, the UK currently has 7.5 GW of battery capacity with an energy capacity of 11 GWh, which equates to 1.5 hours.
Obviously this will go nowhere in a prolonged cold midwinter Dunkelflaute when power is needed most. Such weather conditions can extend into continental Europe to put the international interconnector supply at risk (43 TWh gross imports in 2025). The battery supply might help during the first daily peak demand period but for a prolonged spell of no wind and no sun it will all have to be recharged before the next peak period while still supplying all the non-battery grid demand. It’s extremely unlikely ever to work and is already costing us a fortune.
According to an FT article of a year ago, “To meet its 95 per cent clean power goal, the government estimates Britain will need about 23-27GW of battery storage by 2030, up from about 6GW now. Over the year to June, applications were submitted for 30GW across 400 schemes.”
Heavy reliance on weather-dependent wind and solar means that blackouts look inevitable, and that’s without considering the added risk that these technologies, including the batteries, lack the inertia of conventional rotating plant to support grid stability (ref. the April 2025 national blackout in Spain that all establishment authorities are steadfastly putting a blind eye to and/or praying that the deployment of synchronous condensers will avoid a recurrence).
What a rickety Heath Robinson shambles!
When Europe has a big blackout for many days, then maybe the US will learn.
UK's island geography is now an illusion.
Excellent article and analysis. Thank you.
John Morgan's "Catch 22 of Energy Storage" article is still relevant and accurate today.
https://climatechangefork.blog.brooklyn.edu/2014/11/04/guest-blog-john-morgan-the-catch-22-of-energy-storage-and-eroi/
I first saw it published on Barry Brook's blog, bravenewclimate.com, back when Brook still managed it. It is sad that it is no longer available there, as the comments section contained several hundred comments, many of which included excellent additional analysis. I think one of Brook's students took up the blog, and has rearranged it to the point where the article and comments are no longer accessible and possibly gone altogether.
Looked it up. Ben Heard, I think, took over the site.
This is very timely work EBBs, as I am beginning to see more BESS backing up utility scale Wind, or maybe its WIND backing up BESS, or maybe it will actually be coal backing up both, out here in Wyoming.
I went to the Morgan Lewis article behind your effort and noted this statement
"As a general matter, many states require utilities to produce integrated resource plans (IRPs) to demonstrate how that utility will be able to meet long-term demand projections using a combination of generation, transmission, and energy efficiency investments while also minimizing costs."
I read lots of IRPs. I know they should provide future guidance but they manifestly do not do so. They actually just archive, implicitly, what people have learned in the past two years since the previous version. Look at how the mix or resources has changed in one version after another. There are absurdities. For example, PacifiCorp places batteries in among the generating resouces and never once admit that, as storage, they are also a new load on the grid; then justify ignoring this by saying that batteries as a load can be ignored because they are needed so infrequently.
I note also that the IRP usually shows energy efficiency as a "resource" but the amounts involved are sometimes fantastic. PacifiCorp as an example once again shows efficiency at the end of the planning horizon (year 2045) nearly equalling 60% of present average load (5,000MW of current 8,000MW load). I can't recall which IRP it was, probably their 2023 version, but Idaho Power Company seemed to recognize the estimate of energy efficiency had gotten far away from reality and made a big adjustment.
Good for them, but it alerted me to the possibility that Demand Side Management was being used to simply get the numbers to work out.
I think that's right, we've noticed the same thing. IRPs have increasingly used load modifying resources as a means of lowering the cost of the energy transition, and even then it's still expensive.
Thanks for explaining the over build. People forget that batteries have to be charged. You have 6 hours a day to gather 24 hours of power supply, in the best of circumstances. That means a huge number of solar panels and double that for clouds, take battery round trip efficiency into account and it becomes ridiculous.
I did a back of the napkin on running a 100 MW data center on solar and batteries. It would take 8 square miles of solar panels and cost $2B. And you’d still need a back up system.
Heck, even a gas-plant needs to be over-built, never-mind this stuff.
I remember listening to a Decouple podcast with Chris Keefer interviewing Jigar Shah. He came across as an arrogant jerk. PG words cannot begin to express my utter contempt for this man.
I don’t know how Dr Keefer kept is cool.
I'm with you on the keeping cool issue. Thank goodness we have folks like Keefer and Angwin and several others who can keep their cool and present a sane public face. :-)
Demand flexibility is another term for electricity rationing.
In solar-dominated systems, batteries can spread solar power over 24 hours. That's their limit. Seasonal variations in solar then have to be covered by overbuilding, but trying to overbuild or provide batteries for multiple consecutive cloudy days becomes extremely expensive. That's where the net zero ideology fails. Some dispatchable backup is always needed.
Wind is even more difficult to firm up with batteries. A single wind drought doesn't determine the storage requirement. The maximum need arises from a series of wind droughts with insufficient windy periods in between to charge the batteries. Wind conditions can be below normal for months, with storage requirements in tens of TWh, not GWh.
Worldwide economies run on transportation fuels.
Jet fuel for the military and international airports, diesel fuel for trucks and construction equipment, different grades of gasoline for vehicles, and bunker fuel for all the ships arriving and departing from Ports.
Wind turbines and solar panels can ONLY generate electricity, under favorable weather conditions but CANNOT make any of the products or transportation fuels MADE FROM oil.
Worldwide infrastructures are dependent on continuous and uninterruptable that wind and solar CANNOT provide.
All the money spent on battery storage CANNOT support the various transportation infrastructures, nor meet the products demanded by hospitals, airports, telecommunications, appliances, electronics, sanitation systems, heating and ventilating systems to support current lifestyles.
Shah is no different than the politicians who, when the winds change, change positions and then say “what, me? I never said that.” Except the internet never forgets. From Grok:
**Jigar Shah on the Need for 100% Renewables**
Here are notable quotes and statements from Jigar Shah (Director of the Loan Programs Office at the U.S. Department of Energy and founder of SunEdison) emphasizing why a full transition to 100% renewable energy is both necessary and achievable:
### **On the Scale of Renewable Resources**
> “The available renewable resource is 100 times that of the Nation’s annual electricity need.”
> *(Emphasizing that solar, wind, and other renewables vastly exceed U.S. electricity demand — we’re only using a tiny fraction of what’s available.)*
### **On Cost and Economic Reality**
> “New solar and wind power now costs at least 50% less than new fossil fuel generation.”
> *(Highlighting that renewables are no longer the expensive option — they’re the cheapest new power source.)*
### **On Clean Energy as the Backbone**
> “Clean energy invests twice as much in America as fossil fuels do. We’re not the underdog anymore — we’re the backbone of new power generation. It’s time to sound like it.”
> *(Arguing that the industry must stop acting like the underdog and own its dominant role.)*
### **On Meeting Growing Demand**
> “If solar and wind doesn’t continue to play a role of 80% of everything added to the grid every year, then we’re not gonna be able to support AI, we’re not gonna support load growth, we’re not going to support economic development, air conditioning…”
> *(Stressing that renewables are essential to power future growth, including AI data centers and electrification.)*
### **On Cities and 100% Renewable Electricity**
> “Cities that haven’t yet switched their municipal electricity to 100% renewable via long-term power purchase agreements are leaving money on the table.”
> *(Pointing out that going 100% renewable is now a money-saving move for municipalities.)*
### **On Political Power and Industry Confidence**
> “We are still 80% of everything that gets added to the grid every year… we are under attack. That means that there is a strategy that we have to put in place to actually make sure that we are building our political power…”
> *(Calling for the clean energy sector to organize and defend its position as the dominant new source of power.)*
These quotes reflect Shah’s consistent message: **100% renewables are not just technically feasible and economically superior — they are essential for meeting future energy demand, cutting costs, and maintaining America’s energy leadership.**