Battery Storage—An Infinitesimal Part of Electrical Power
The current renewable developer still counts on the legacy fossil energy system to balance out the intermittency they bring to the grid. So far, because of the fossil system but also overbuild in the past, this worked more or less in developed countries and yet, it has already pushed power prices in those countries that have gone out on a limb on renewables such as Southern Australia, Germany or Denmark to climb to stratospheric levels. Those prices start to scratch on the consensus but they have not seen nothing yet. As we hit the limits of what we had from the past, we enter new territory in which we will be hit with the consequences of intermittency in a much more direct manner, without the palliative in place. Now we will have even higher prices – not just percentage points but multiples – and additionally, there will be brownouts and blackouts in formerly industrialized nations. People will start to feel what this does to them. I understand that there is a sense of panic in the renewable world as they can see this coming …
Large-scale storage of electricity is the latest proposed solution to boost the deployment of renewables. Renewable energy advocates, businesses, and state governments plan to use batteries to store electricity to solve the problem of intermittent wind and solar output. But large-scale storage is only an insignificant part of the electrical power industry and doomed to remain so for decades to come.
