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By Jo Nova
For some reason wind and solar power will not be powering a new EV battery factory in Kansas. Instead the sudden extra demand for electricity will be met by keeping an old coal-fired plant running.
Environmentalists are not happy. Wait ’til they realize no one even knows if EV’s will reduce carbon dioxide at all.
EV Battery Factory Will Require So Much Energy It Needs A Coal Plant To Power It
Kevon Killough, Cowboy State Daily
A $4 billion Panasonic electric vehicle battery factory in De Soto, Kansas, will help satisfy the Biden administration’s efforts to get everyone into an EV. It also will help extend the life of a coal-fired power plant.
The Kansas City Star reports that the factory will require between 200 and 250 megawatts of electricity to operate. That’s roughly the amount of power needed for a small city.
Naturally, to make something utterly pointless takes a lot of taxpayer money and Panasonic will receive $6.8 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act, which will, quite possibly, increase emissions and create inflation too.
As Mark Mills said it takes 250 tons of material to make […]
By Jo Nova
Once again, batteries just aren’t living up to hopes and dreams. Only a year ago Rolls Royce were excited about the nine-seater P-Volt electric plane — forecasting that it would be carrying customers on ninety mile hops in 2025 and 250 miles by 2030. Alas, it must have been a sobering year. The developers of the P-Volt have pulled the pin indefinitely and decided to wait until battery capacity and weight improvements make it realistic.
The P-Volt made by Tecnam
Pioneering electric plane shelved as batteries only last a few hundred flights
Howard Mustoe, The Telegraph
A pioneering electric plane developer has shelved development of its new craft after discovering that its batteries will only last a few hundred flights before they need to be replaced.
Tecnam said its main challenge was the energy density of the batteries available today, which are relatively too heavy for the amount of power they can store.
The speed at which the batteries would lose charge would erode the nine-passenger craft’s value, ruining its commercial prospects, it added.
“Not commercially viable” could be name for most Green engineering.
What do we […]
By Jo Nova
Wade Allison has done a short but devastating analysis for the GWPF. The take home message is that the energy contained in the wind is diabolically more erratic than most people realize. It’s just basic physics and almost no one in politics seems able to comprehend just how impossible these numbers are. If only they would “follow the science” eh?
Thanks to Paul Homewood at Notalotofpeopleknowthat.
The exponential death of affordable electricity
It’s just physics. The power of the blowing wind increases by the speed of those particles cubed which produces a twin engineering nightmare. If the wind doubles in speed, the energy goes up by a factor of 8 (or 2 × 2 × 2, and we need to spell it out), and if it slows by half, the energy drops eight-fold. It’s bad both ways. At high speeds, the mechanical engineers have to turn off the turbines to protect them, and at low speeds the electrical engineers have to ramp up power stations that may not exist, or pray to Gaia for batteries that will never exist.
Allison has a graph showing the total output of all the wind turbines in the UK and Europe […]
By Jo Nova The amount of storage America needs for a grid run on erratic wind and solar power is so galactically vast the numbers don’t matter. Because every which way they are calculated, every estimate, the highest one, the lowest one, it doesn’t make any difference. They are all unaffordable.
And they’re not just unaffordable in the sense that it hurts. They’re unaffordable in the sense that there is no economy left.
Basically America would need 12,500 times as many batteries as it has now. At current prices this would cost about $175 trillion dollars, which is eight times the entire GDP of the United States.
Some researchers predict costs will fall, but even at fantasy low ball estimates that are one tenth of current prices, the cost of those batteries is still nearly $20 trillion.
Astronomical battery cost looms over “renewables”
David Wojick, CFACT
We now know that the battery storage for the entire American grid is impossibly expensive, thanks to a breakthru study by engineer Ken Gregory. Looking at several recent years he analyzed, on an hour by hour basis, the electricity produced with fossil fuels. He then calculated what it […]
By Jo Nova
The impossible conundrum: Going Netzero cancels your ability to get to Netzero
The industrial death spiral grows: Europe is the king of renewables and it’s also got the most expensive energy in the world making it impossible for the EU to make the things it needs to get to NetZero.
The EU lost their solar panel factories to China years ago, and the wind industry was worried they were going the same Sino way the solar industry went. A few months ago, the Vestas chief admitted that they were losing money on every wind turbine they sell. (Good thing their orders were collapsing, eh?)
Now the Volkswagen chief warns that things are so expensive, it soon won’t be viable to make electric cars and batteries in Europe either — which must be a bit of nasty surprise given that they just started building the first of six planned battery factories in Europe.
How fast those balance sheets change…
Naturally, the whole industry is calling for more subsidies. Obviously they can’t ask for what they really need, cheap energy.
‘We are treading water:’ An energy crisis is grinding European industry to a halt as the U.S. and […]
More deadly than man-made climate change
Six people have died in New York this year so far due to house fires started by e-bikes. I had no idea.
Fires from exploding e-bike batteries multiply in NYC — sometimes fatally
Matthew Schuerman, NPR
NEW YORK — Four times a week on average, an e-bike or e-scooter battery catches fire in New York City.
These bikes when they fail, they fail like a blowtorch,” said Dan Flynn, the chief fire marshal at the New York Fire Department. “We’ve seen incidents where people have described them as explosive — incidents where they actually have so much power, they’re actually blowing walls down in between rooms and apartments.”
As of Friday, the FDNY investigated 174 battery fires, putting 2022 on track to double the number of fires that occurred last year (104) and quadruple the number from 2020 (44). So far this year, six people have died in e-bike-related fires and 93 people were injured, up from four deaths and 79 injuries last year.
In early August, a 27-year-old Venezuelan immigrant, identified as Rafael Elias Lopez-Centeno, died after his lithium ion battery caught fire […]
by Jo Nova
Just another day saving the Earth from pollution
Highways were shut for 12 hours and people had to seal themselves in their homes for hours.
Green Inferno: Tesla Battery Catches Fire in California Causing Shelter-In-Place
A Tesla Megapack battery caught fire at PG&E’s Elkhorn Battery Storage facility in Monterey County, California. A shelter-in-place advisory was in place for 12 hours due to fears of toxic smoke from the fire caused by Elon Musk’s battery system, with county officials announcing that even though the fire was “fully controlled” by 7:00 p.m. PT, “smoke may still occur in the area for several days.”
Monterey County Sheriff’s Office, North County Fire Protection District, and Pacific Gas & Electric had all issued a shelter-in-place advisory for nearby areas, including an interactive map showing which areas are affected and closing roads for over 12 hours.
Local residents were told to shut all windows and turn off ventilation systems due to the hazardous waste material that may have entered the atmosphere due to the Tesla Megapack fire.
Also this week, but so much worse:
Electric scooter battery fire kills 8-year-old in US
New York: Amid […]
Australia has added more unreliable wind and solar than anywhere on Earth but when an energy crisis strikes, and those prices are still on fire, the solution is more of the same.
Senator Matt Canavan, The Australian
As rest of the world wakes up on coal, we’re closing it down
Perhaps Australia’s broken electricity system is due to this mad rush towards renewable energy? No, according to our energy regulator, “Recent international events and Australian market events have further strengthened the case for the shift to renewables.”
The renewable energy investments must continue until morale improves.
[The energy regulator’s] recent analysis shows that Victoria could experience a “renewable drought” of 1 terawatt hour of electricity over just one week in the future.
How much is 1TWh? Well, the South Australian big battery can produce 130 megawatt hours, so we would need more than 7500 of these to keep the Victorian lights on. At about $100m a pop, that is a total cost of more than $700bn, or more than Victoria’s total annual economic output.
This winter’s energy shortfalls came just after the Liddell coal-fired […]
Someone needs to tell the Australian Energy Minister the bad news about batteries
Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen says we just need more renewables and more storage:
Bowen says we can store water, we should be able to store power
“You can say the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine. Well, the rain doesn’t always fall either but we managed to store the water,” Bowen said.
Chris Bowen isn’t having any of Uhlmann’s ‘wind doesn’t always blow’ rhetoric.
“the rain doesn’t always fall either, but we manage to store the water – we can store the renewable energy if we have the investment”#auspol pic.twitter.com/LjJkEr3zJy
— Squizz (@SquizzSTK) June 16, 2022
Is this Chris Bowen’s Zuma-numbers moment with electricity?
He doesn’t seem to realize that electrons won’t politely sit in a shoe box waiting for the day they run your toaster. When South Australia got the worlds biggest battery in 2017 everyone got excited but few realized it would only power the state for two whole minutes before it ran out. South Australia is just 6% of the total National Energy Market, but if we were trying […]
Do EV’s make good reefs?
h/t to Paul Homewood who notes The BBC didn’t mention the burning lithium battery story.
The Felicity Ace cargo ship caught fire on Wednesday last week:
German newspaper Handelsblatt reported that an internal email from Volkswagen USA stated that the ship was carrying 3,965 vehicles of the VW, Porsche, Audi and Lamborghini brands.
It’s not clear if the fire started in an EV battery but once the flames got into them, the ship was abandoned to burn.
According to a study done in 2013 by the German Federal Ministry of Transport, Building, and Urban Development, the batteries burn extremely hot and produce noxious gases.
“In the event of a lithium ion battery catching fire, it is important to note that such a fire reaches very high temperatures, produces toxic gases and is inextinguishable,” the report concluded. — The Independent
Five days later the fire has finally run out of material to consume.
Now Felicity Burnt. | Reuters
Luxury cars on fire on cargo ships is a thing now
March 12th, 2019: The Grande America caught fire with 2,000 luxury cars on board and sank.
[…]
We’ll be teaching our children different fire safety lessons soon — starting with “don’t try this IN your home?”.
All the kilojoules came out at once.
Commentary sent with the video:
The battery of a scooter explodes while it is being charged. The person still had the presence of mind to remove the socket, but it was too late because the chemical reaction was already underway. This is what firefighters fear when it comes to electric cars.
As well as the battery of your ebike! Charging in a fireproof box or outside is not a luxury.
h/t Alistair P, and Helen D.
10 out of 10 based on 82 ratings
We all heard about the Tesla Megabattery fire in Victoria last Friday, but you may not know it only started operating on Thursday night. Or that 30 fire trucks and 150 firefighters took 76 hours to get the blazing battery under control.
So it burned for three times longer than it operated.
When they burn, Tesla batteries produce smoke with aluminum, cadmium, arsenic, mercury, lead, selenium, manganese and chromium.
Luckily no one would put a large Tesla battery inside their home, eh?
…
Firefighters were essentially helpless to stop the 13 ton lithium battery from burning, but they did stop the rest of the battery plant catching fire.
“…we cannot put them out with water or anything else. The best way to deal with these things is to let them burn until they are burnt out. If we try and cool them down, it just prolongs the process. …this wind is helping us by keeping it burning fairly freely,” the CFA’s Assistant Chief Fire Officer Ian Beswicke said.
“But we could be here anywhere from 8 to 24 [or even 76] hours while we wait for it to burn down.”
They also measured air […]
Sudden tragic release of stored chemical energy in Beirut
It turns out storing Megawatts of high density energy in a confined space is “like a bomb”. Who could have seen that coming, apart from everyone who understands what a megawatt is?
Clean, green, noisy and explosive.
And they are “unregulated” in the UK.
GWPF
UK’s giant battery ‘farms’ spark fears of explosions that can reach temperatures of 660C
Amy Oliver Mail on Sunday
…according to a troubling new report from leading physicists, these vast batteries amount to electrical bombs with the force of many hundreds of tons of TNT.
With the potential for huge explosions, fires and clouds of toxic gas, they could devastate towns and villages nearby, says Wade Allison, emeritus professor of physics at Oxford University and co-author of the report.
The batteries, designed as reservoirs of spare electricity for when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun fails to shine, are spreading around the British countryside. And this, says Prof Allison and his fellow scientists, could spell catastrophe.
It’s like a potential bomb,’ he says. ‘When batteries catch fire, you can’t just squirt water on […]
Battery back-up is so expensive and uneconomic that South Australian householders are ignoring the SA governments offer of a $6000 gift to entice them to buy them.
One man installed the batteries and still spent $18,000. Obviously batteries are a “tempting” offer for renters and the poor (if they win lotto).
Home battery scheme off to sluggish start in SA, despite $6,000 subsidy
Richard Davies, ABC
For the past 12 months, the SA Government has offered households $6,000 towards a battery, as well as access to low-cost loans to install solar panels. But so far only about 3,700 have applied, with only 2,000 batteries installed — significantly less than the target of connecting 40,000 households over four years.
Energy analyst Tristan Edis said …
“At best, you’d be getting a payback at around eight years…” and “another reason was that feed-in tariffs to export solar energy back to the grid were still relatively generous — about 15 cents per kilowatt hour.
South Australia is the economic space where one distorted market signal meets another.
The opposition could have pointed out how this hurts the poor, but instead complain that the conservative govt […]
World made 0.000001°C cooler, but house made 600°C hotter
Remember The Precautionary Principle: something about “no House-B”?
An Orange Flash and then Melanie’s House Burnt Down
Melanie Sandford was sitting in bed on a rainy Sunday morning listening to a podcast about enlightenment when she heard a “huge bang”.
“A nanosecond later, there was an orange flash that ripped down past the bedroom door,” Ms Sandford said.
All signs point to the lithium ion battery of Ms Sandford’s beloved eZee Sprint e-bike as the culprit.
The firefighters arrived promptly – “I’m told it was four minutes but it felt like three hours” – but it was too late to save her home.
Another hidden battery cost?
GlowWorm Bicycles said eZee has recalled some faulty batteries, but lists these Handy safety tips for all e-bike batteries: Don’t charge them unsupervised, don’t overcharge, undercharge, charge near flammable things or charge overnight, and have a fire safety plan.
B A T T E R Y S A F E T Y
8.9 out of 10 based on 100 ratings […]
Make no mistake, Bill Gates totally believes the climate change scare story but even he can see that renewables are not the answer, it’s not about the cost, it’s the reliability.
He quotes Vaslav (possibly Vaclav Smil?):
Here’s Toyko, 27 million people, you have three days of a cyclone every year. It’s 23GW of electricity for three days. Tell me what battery solution is going sit there and provide that power.
As Gates says: Let’s not jerk around. You’re multiple orders of magnitude — … — That’s nothing, that doesn’t solve the reliability problem.
Bill Gates on renewables (part 1). I’ve never seen him so animated. His Tokyo in a cyclone scenario is interesting. pic.twitter.com/N2nhl2u9Ut
— David Michie (@dmichie66) December 9, 2018
h/t Craig KellyMP
During storms clouds cut solar panel productivity (unless hail destroys it) and wind turbines have to shut down in high winds.
The whole interview was part of a presentation at Stanford late last year:
Cheap renewables won’t stop global warming, says Bill Gates
The interview by Arun Majumdar, co-director of Stanford Energy’s Precourt Institute for Energy, which organized the conference, can be watched here.
9.3 […]
Channel Seven News.
Unintended consequences: When your insurance to stop the planet burning burns down your house instead.
Storing all that energy in a small box at home. What could possibly go wrong?
Fire crews are warning that solar powered batteries may cause fires that move fast and burn with “ferocity”.
Solar home battery warning after Brisbane house fire
Brisbane Times, Toby Crockford
The homeowner told reporters they had solar panels connected to lithium-ion batteries and suspected the fire started nearby, a view shared by firefighter Malcolm Muscat.
“[There were] approximately three battery banks so lithium-ion, lead-acid batteries, they burn with a ferocity that moves through the house quickly,” Mr Muscat said.
Remember: When the future of the planet is at stake, there’s no such thing as too much insurance.
We just hope the owners had plenty.
Friends and family can be consoled that the house has been sacrificed for a good fashionable cause.
Note this is the “suspected” cause in this fire, but solar panels have been linked to many other house fires.
Does your home need a “fire bunker”? ‘Years to understand’ fire risk of solar power systems
From […]
The ABC reports that finally the people of SA can find out what the emergency Tesla battery cost — $56 per person, or $220 per family, just for the purchase, not for the operation. Hands up South Australians, who would have rushed to sign up to be the Star Renewable State if they had to sign the checks themselves and their electricity bill had a item called: “The price of renewables”.
South Australia didn’t need a battery when it had coal power:
A 505-page report released by Neoen this month ahead of an initial public offering suggested the battery cost around $90 million, at the current exchange rate.
The giant 100-megawatt lithium ion battery near Jamestown in the state’s mid-north commenced operation late last year.
“It actually costs taxpayers’ money. There’s a cost of $4-5 million a year to have the battery in place.
“There are more costs than that involved.
Where does Giles Parkinson think these “revenues” come from?
However, Giles Parkinson said the battery was on track to “make revenues of about $25-26 million in its first year”
The battery makes no electricity. All it does is shift […]
The new SA rescue plan is more diesel than battery
Diesel’s prototype engine circa 1892.
A big fuss was made today over the world record battery, but the diesel generators put on a hire-purchase plan three days ago are more than twice the power:
The world’s biggest lithium ion battery has been launched in South Australia, with Premier Jay Weatherill declaring it an example of SA “leading the world”.
The first diesel generator was patented in 1892. Go, Go, SA.
A battery bandaid arrived barely in the nick of time:
That reliability was tested before the battery’s official launch when it began dispatching around 59 megawatts into the state’s electricity network on Thursday afternoon as the state hit temperatures above 30C.
How fragile is this system?
The facility has the capacity to power 30,000 homes for up to an hour in the event of a severe blackout but is more likely to be called into action to even out electricity supplies at less critical times.
There are 673,540 households in South Australia and the Big Battery can supply 4% of them for an hour with electricity, or all of the state for a […]
The Greens are now asking for another $2.2billion to pay for the battery bandaid to fix a problem they and the leeching renewables industry created.
Adam Bandt is out today with the big new plan, apparently confused about what “load” means:
We don’t have a baseload problem, we have a peak load problem,” Mr Bandt said.
No matter how you look at this, it’s not a “load” problem. It’s an issue of supply.
We can count on the Greens to pour confusion on any problem:
“We need flexible generation and energy storage to manage the transition, not more coal.”
Four mistakes in one sentence. We have flexible generation – more than enough to cope with the current load curve. What we need is affordable electricity, which we used to have, and which coal supplies. What we don’t need is energy storage to manage an irrelevant transition that we never had to have in the first place. Let me say it again, electricity generators are for generating electricity, not for magical attempts to control the climate.
What Adam Bandt was trying to say:
“We The freeloading renewables industry needs flexible generation and energy storage to […]
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