Cost of the battery plant to run LA for ONE DAY, $41 billion, or approximately the cost of 40 1GW combined cycle gas-fired generating plants. Just sayin'.
Yeah, but at those prices, you wouldn't size the battery plant to run LA for 1 day. You'd size the battery plant to cover the expected unplanned supply drop during the spin up time of your standby plants, be they combined gas cycle plants or otherwise. Times an appropriate margin of safety.
If that were the case, the graph I showed you of the acceleration of temperature being essentially zero, wouldn't be zero.
Yeah now we gotta factor in new EV's that can be used to back feed a house.
Thats neat, I looked it up:
ohiohistorycentral.org
OK, pick a number. An hour? That would give you one and two-thirds gas plants. And plan on replacing the batteries every 10 years or so, vs 40-60 years for a fossil-fueled plant. And what were you planning to do at night (I hear that happens once a day) and when the wind doesn't blow? The cost to idle a fossil plant and use it only for standby is enormous, versus using it for baseload. This is the hidden way unreliables drive up power costs, because as publicly regulated monopolies, power producers usually have a fixed rate of return, so if you lower their run time from 8,000 hours per year to 2,000 hours per year, each MW-hr of electricity gets to be almost 3X as expensive or even more. Australia has a very high penetration of unreliables into the grid. The Australian spot market price for electricity has been as high as AUS$14,500/MW-hr. That's right, 14.50 per kilowatt-hour.
You ignored my request to establish what the parameters for the battery plant were, so I'm not necessarily the only one moving or ignoring goal posts. My contention is use conventional generation with reasonable reserve and skip the battery angst. And where do you get the idea that cloud coverage is predictable on a statewide grid basis? If you watch a good quality radar image, say with 5 minute or so time steps, it's clear that clouds develop and disappear on a rolling basis, they don't just get generated a couple hundred miles away and sweep across the landscape until they gradually peter out. I think AccuWeather uses a 10 minute time step.
LA uses about 60 GW-hr per day. Yes, 40GW of power plants would produce way more than LA consumes per day, it's just to illustrate why "investing" in a battery system may not be the most economical method to get what you want.
I agree it's puzzling why we haven't seen the acceleration yet. On the other hand, it's fortunate we haven't seen much acceleration yet.
My contention is that if you have 100% fossil fuel coverage for your electrical generation needs, and you fully price the emissions of fossil fuels, including CO2, then you save money/pollution (using whatever rate of exchange between the two that is appropriate) by adding renewables, along with whatever supply stability support the renewables may require in the form of batteries or whatever. I don't have the numbers on hand to prove that, it would be very nice to see a detailed balanced analysis. But I have the impression that it's either true today or we've reached break even and the trend line will make fully priced renewables cheaper soon.
1. Correlation is not causation. You said this yourself, I believe, or someone did upthread. Fossil fuel use has shown an unrelenting march upward, not just linearly increasing with time, but showing increases year-over-year. There is no acceleration in the temperature rise (you just admitted this), therefore no coupling between CO2 and temperature increase. At best there may be, somewhere, a weak effect which may show up in the data someday. This is not enough to derail the world economy with carbon taxes and carbon capture and sequestration schemes.
Sure, but when the physics (per observed atmospheric IR absorption spectra) tells you to expect an effect (temperature rise), and you see the effect, that is generally considered confirmation.
I haven't, actually, I just agreed your graph didn't show any. I'm not enough of a subject matter expert to know if that's the correct graph, or if we should expect acceleration at a detectable level, or if the expected acceleration is still at a level that is drowned out by the noise. You certainly raise a good question, but that's not nearly enough to reject the physics and the evidence.
