At RealClearEnergy Michael Kelly explains the complexities of electrification:
A typical house in the UK draws 2-3kW of electrical power, averaged over the year, with peaks of order 5kW in winter. A single slow charger for a car draws 7kW, with a fast-charger drawing 15kW. The substations in most suburbs were installed before the need for recharging car batteries, and most will need to be upgraded to handle the extra demand.
Given also that 40% of UK cars do not have a garage and are parked on the street, there is also the problem of how they will be charged. Cars used by commuters will need charging points, either at home or place of work, or both. As many local authorities have bylaws preventing electric cables from crossing pathways, how will suburban commuters be assured that they can charge their cars? In the last major winter storm in 2012, when the M25 London orbital road was gridlocked, it was electric cars with flat batteries that delayed the clear-up.
At the same time, Britain’s adoption of net zero means that it has to decarbonize home heating. At present, this is mostly done cheaply and efficiently with natural gas. The average energy used per day in our personal mobility and logistics is relatively constant through the year, with small excursions downward on weekends and variations over seasons. This is in contrast to the future demand for electric heat to replace gas heating: here, there exists a factor of between 8 and 10 between the use of gas in winter and summer. The current gas grid copes with that by a faster flow of gas. This feature would also be required for a future grid capable of handling all our heat demands.
Where will all this extra electricity – averaging more than the grid of today – come from? Will the current transmission system be able to cope? If both heating and mobility are to be provided without fossil fuels, the UK will need to more than treble the energy in the current electricity grid. Renewable energy cannot make up the difference. We simply do not have the area, onshore and offshore, for sufficient wind and solar farms.
Those complexities include generation, storage, and transmission and they can’t simply be waved away or assumed that they will be addressed within the target timeframe.
One complexity he does not consider: I’m not convinced that batteries of the requisite capacities and quality can be produced in sufficient quantities within the timeframe.
I don’t think it’s much different here or even worse. Winters in much of the US are significantly colder than in the UK (I lived in the UK for almost 4 years). So much would need to change in order to transition to all-electric. I just think about what it would cost to change my own house over to electricity from natural gas. $20k-$30k I’d estimate.
In other news, when presented with these realities AOC was quoted as saying “oopsey.”
Battery energy content is the problem. A modern lithium ion battery stores about 0.3 MJ/kg or 0.4 MJ/L. Gasoline contains 100 times as much energy: 47.5 MJ/kg or 34.6 MJ/L.
Electrochemistry is one of the oldest and best established sciences. Volta invented the Cu/Zn battery in 1799. Today, the energy yield of every possible battery anode/cathode pair can be calculated theoretically. This is one science that is pretty much completed. There are no secret batteries to be discovered. There will be no breakthrough in battery design that will allow batteries to approach the energy density of fossil fuels.
As expensive as turbines are, the batteries required to store excess generating capacity is very much more expensive. The estimates for a purely renewable electrical power source with battery backup for California is that the batteries alone would cost between $7 trillion and $10 trillion dollars. The required installed generating capacity for solar would be around 800 GWH to cover the worst day on record in California, which is about 15 times the peak generating power if one uses natural gas.
Manhattan Contrarian has done the math and has the details:
https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-7-29-a-little-arithmetic-the-costs-of-non-fossil-fuel-back-up-for-solar-power
https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-8-10-trying-to-see-if-californias-energy-plans-add-up
https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2018-8-6-what-is-the-cost-of-getting-to-a-100-renewable-electric-grid
Slightly OT but did you see the Hanania piece to which Cowen linked? Note that conservatives nearly always need to link comments to someone. Dont really deal with concepts or ideas per se.
https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/liberals-read-conservatives-watch
Steve
I hadn’t read it before.
A lot of it can be stated a lot more simply: progressives rely on news sources with a progressive bias while conservatives rely on news sources with a conservative bias; neither conservatives nor progressives rely as heavily on relatively unbiased sources. Some of it appears to be projection, some overgeneralization.
Much of the rest confirms that Gramsci was right.
If you’re wondering what a “relatively unbiased” source is the NEWS reporting in the Wall Street Journal, the AP, and Reuters is relatively unbiased. The OPINION page of the Wall Street Journal leans slightly right.
That they read different sources is not news, but the ways in which the sources are different interesting (with he understanding as the author noted that there is a lot fo overlap). For the right a lot more comes from radio and TV and even their written sources are more like TV with a lot more ads. Helps to explain the right wing obsession with supplements. The right is also more personal with the left being more policy. It has always seemed odd to me that the conservatives always haver to link everything to some person and often that person doesnt seem to have much to do with the topic. Like AOC above.
Steve
I think that’s because progressives’ control of print media is so strong. More about policy? Again I think that when the agenda is set by progressives that is to be expected.
I can’t think of an example of a print outlet that expresses views that affirm today’s conservatives viewpoint. Can you? I can think of lots that express the progressives’ viewpoint. Practically all of them.
Am I the only one that thinks it is strange that climate experts are politicians, actors, and ER doctors. Climate science seems devoid of physics, thermodynamics, geology, oceanography, fluid mechanics, etc.
“I can’t think of an example of a print outlet that expresses views that affirm today’s conservatives viewpoint.”
The country is pretty evenly split. There are lots of rich Republicans. Murdoch owns a lot of media. So if they wanted to control major print media they could. So why dont they? I would posit that they are quite happy with talk radio and TV and lowbrow websites.
“Climate science seems devoid of physics, thermodynamics, geology, oceanography, fluid mechanics, etc.”
Read the science journals. No one I read quotes actors or politicians. Or look this guy up.
Hasselmann graduated in physics and mathematics at the University of Hamburg in 1955 with a thesis on isotropic turbulence. He earned his PhD in physics at the University of Göttingen and Max Planck Institute of Fluid Dynamics from 1955 to 1957. Physics AND fluid dynamics.
Steve