How big a battery?

Energy and Climate Policy—An Evaluation of Global Climate Change Expenditure 2011–2018

“…Then, when demand increases above supply, this stored energy could be returned. However, others have pointed out that the storage capacity required would be unrealistically enormous, and satisfactory resolutions to this problem have not yet been demonstrated with available technologies [19,[21][22][23][24]45].…”

“…For instance, van Kooten et al (2020) note that, although Tesla have recently "built what is considered to be a gigantic, 100-MW (MW)/129-MW-hour (MWh) capacity battery in South Australia to address blackouts resulting from renewable energy intermittency" [24], they calculate that, if the state of Alberta (Canada) were to rely solely on intermittent electricity sources for 36 of Rohan (1986).) [84].…”

“…On the other hand, several researchers and opinion-makers have argued that a "zero-carbon" alternative post-industrial revolution, involving a transition towards wind-and solar-generated electricity, along with the widespread electrification of transport systems and improvements in energy efficiency (possibly also including bioenergy) is not only feasible, but desirable, e.g., Gore (2006Gore ( , 2017 [11,12], Jacobson et al (2011Jacobson et al ( , 2015Jacobson et al ( , 2017Jacobson et al ( , 2018 [13][14][15][16], Klein (2015) [17], and Goodall (2016) [18]. Although these claims have been disputed in the scientific literature [19][20][21][22][23][24], they are eagerly promoted by environmental advocacy groups such as Greenpeace [25,26] and protest movements such as "Extinction Rebellion" [27] and "Fridays For Future" [28], achieving strong currency in both mainstream and social media. This has prompted many political groups and governments to reshape their policy platforms accordingly [29,30], e.g., in terms of a "Green New Deal" [31][32][33].…”

“…A major engineering problem with wind-, solar-, and also tidal-generated electricity is that these are "intermittent" (also called "non-dispatchable" or "variable") electricity generation technologies. While it has been argued that this can in principle be overcome through a combination of energy storage [48,49] and/or a major continental-scale expansion in the electricity transmission networks [50], others have noted that the scale of these projects is enormous [19,[21][22][23][24]45]. Many have asked why, if reducing greenhouse gas emissions is to be genuinely considered as the top priority, solutions involving increases in nuclear energy and/or transitioning from coal/oil to natural gas are continually dismissed or sidelined [20,21,23,38,39,[41][42][43][44]51,52]?…”

Techno-economic optimisation of battery storage for grid-level energy services using curtailed energy from wind

“…Khalid M, et al [39], however, did not use some key economic factors such as operation and maintenance costs, battery degradation, costs for converters in the study that have a significant influence on the economic outcomes. Another investigation on the economic feasibility of replacing two thirds of coal generation with renewable energy (wind and solar) integrated with a large scale BESS (Li-ion) in Alberta electricity system was studied in [40]. The economic results were compared with other options such as a 100% renewable and baseline scenario (coal 48%, gas 47% and wind 5%).…”