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Storing Electricity On The Grid Is Part Of Climate Short List

But we’ll need a lot less grid storage than most people think

Michael Barnard

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Published in

The Future is Electric

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5 min read

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2 days ago

In the short list of climate actions that will work, storage gets pride of place. As naysayers can’t seem to resist stating, the wind doesn’t blow all the time and the sun doesn’t shine at night.

But we need a lot less grid storage than most people think. Why? Because storage exists in context of a few interrelated solutions. As the short list makes clear, we’re going to overbuild renewables just as we overbuilt every form of electrical generation except nuclear energy. We run some gas plants at 10% of their potential annual generation or less. U.S. coal plants, considered to be always on baseload by many, produced only 35% of their potential electricity in 2022 and only 55% in China.

We’re also going to transmit more electricity further through high-voltage direct current transmission lines, which enable much more energy to flow with much lower losses. Continent-scale and larger interconnections are being built globally, linking Morocco to the U.K., Israel to Greece, ASEAN to China and Canada to the U.S. Spreading more renewables over a bigger area reduces most of the requirement for storage that geographically bounded, limited-technology studies claimed would be required.

But we’re still going to need a lot. Assuming a 100% renewables world, the Jacobson et al scenario out of Stanford of 143 countries is a good place to start. I’ve spent a lot of time with the Jacobson papers and Jacobson himself over the past few years, and have generally found the scenario to be conservative and plausible, although we disagree about a few things like the percentage of rooftop solar that will be in the mix and biofuels.

The study suggests we’ll only need 3.7 terawatts of power in grid storage systems world wide to balance those overbuilt renewables and continent-scale grids. Of course, power isn’t all that we need. Think of electricity in terms of a car. It has horsepower which is how much oomph it can provide at a given moment, and it has a gas tank full of fuel which allows it to keep delivering that oomph. That 3.7 terawatts of power requires many multiples of energy. We need a big gas tank, in other words.