ery Storage is a Fantasy // (John Hinderaker).

The electricity produced by wind and solar panels is well below 50 percent, a fact that will not change. How do you keep the lights on in a “green” world? Liberals suggest that battery storage is used. The electric grid is not a storage device. The grid’s electricity must be used in the same moment it is produced. Amazingly, however no liberal or environmentalist has attempted to show that battery storage on the required scale is feasible, let alone affordable. It is impossible.

Francis Menton just published a paper about energy storage. His findings are summarized at on his web site.

The paper’s main point is that an electrical grid powered mostly with intermittent generators like sun and wind requires full backup from at least one source. If that source is stored energy, the storage requirements are staggering. It becomes clear that the entire project is impossible to finance and impractical if you do simple math. Politicians and activists pushing for this new energy system of solar/wind/storage are either intentionally misleading or completely incompetent.

For example,

Consider Germany, which is the country that has made the most progress on the path to “energy transition.” My Report contains two calculations of Germany’s energy storage requirements in a world with a wind/solar grid but no fossil fuels . Roger Andrews calculated a requirement of approximately 25,000 GWh. Ruhnau, Qvist and Qvist calculated a higher number of 56,000 GWh. Both methods use somewhat different assumptions and are not identical. There is obviously a lot of uncertainty about the actual requirement, but the two calculations cited provide a reasonable range to help you understand the scope of the problem. ***

These projections for a storage need in the range of tens to thousands of GWh are not supported by Germany’s plans for a “20-fold expansion” of its economy by 2031. My Report:

Germany’s Wood Mackenzie stated that the planned energy storage capacity in 2031 after a 20-fold expansion is 8.81GWh.

It’s not tens of millions of GWh. It’s single digits. How does this compare to the projected requirements in percentage terms? :

This means that Germany’s 2031 energy storage plan is 0.016% to 0.036% below what it would actually need. This is not a serious effort to create a system that might work.

This absurdity is repeated in every jurisdiction that has attempted to mandate solar energy and wind energy. California is an example:

The Report cites another article by Utility Dive that states that the California Public Utilities Commission ordered power providers to collectively procure, by 2026, approximately 10.5 GW (or 42.0 GWH) of lithium-ion battery storage for grid-scale storage.

California would have an additional 10.5 GW lithium-ion storage capacity. This would translate to at most 42 GWh.

This is a joke. This is a joke. There are not enough batteries in the world to meet the world’s electricity needs. Isaac Orr, my colleague, created this simple graph that shows the global battery capacity as projected in 2030 versus the electricity consumption of Minnesota.

Is there any single place in the world that has met its citizens’ demand for electricity via solar or wind energy plus batteries as liberals now demand? There isn’t.

Here’s the bottom line: There is no working demonstration project in the world of the wind/solar/storage system. There are also no projects under construction or even being considered.

The entire green energy project is a huge fraud. A few shysters and activists are making a lot of money, while politicians and activists will continue to hold the bag. The future is unknown.