Don’t Bet on Batteries
6th January 2022
Wind and solar energy are notoriously unreliable sources of electricity, with the best wind turbines producing electricity a little over 40 percent of the time, and solar panels faring even worse. Where I live, solar panels work around 18 percent of the time, and the electricity they produce is so faint that when they are covered by snow in the winter–I know, it’s a shock, but that happens in Minnesota and other northern states–they aren’t worth shoveling off.
Can anything save wind and solar energy from irrelevance? If you ask a liberal that question, his answer will be: batteries! Batteries that will store electricity when wind turbines and solar panels actually work, and discharge that electricity the rest of the time. Do batteries approaching such a scale actually exist? Well, no. It’s a concept.
January 6th, 2022 at 16:01
I’m sorta fascinated by the fanatics that get into this subject and pretty much screw everything up. Electric vehicles certainly have advantages in some areas, but they don’t reduce overall pollution – in fact it’s not even a contest. Solar panels and wind generators have terrible cost recovery in almost all applications.
Meanwhile, there are good things happening that make huge improvements. LEDs, for example, severely cut electric usage and do so with higher reliability than the light sources they replace. Higher efficiency air conditioners, improved internal combustion engines, cogeneration, and so many other systems are deeply cutting power consumption. I have friends in San Diego where solar panels do work well (as opposed to say someone in Minnesota). Battery improvements and capacitor systems have great potential. The improvements of the last 10 years alone are remarkable. And, yet, the fanatics are not happy unless a magic unicorn-powered commuter train appears in their neighborhood this week.