Think your power bill is crushing now; the worst is yet to come. The grand wind and solar ‘transition’ is – according to the 5 year planners – in its infancy, but already the effects of heavily subsidised and chaotically intermittent wind and solar are being spelt out in record retail power bills.
To reach our utopian energy Nirvana, we are told, requires trillions more in taxpayer subsidies for mythical mega lithium-ion batteries, and extending transmission grids to bring the power generated by wind and solar (only occasionally, of course) from far-flung places to market.
America’s socialist call it the Green New Deal.
David Wojick calls it a costly recipe for disaster.
The Green New Deal could make electricity 28 times more expensive
CFACT
David Wojick
3 September 2024
Below, I show how the Green New Deal can cause the average household electricity bill to go up a crushing $52,500. The reason is simple. Wind and solar require a lot of battery backup, and we use a tremendous amount of electricity, so the cost of all these batteries is many trillions of dollars.
Here is the basic derivation. It is kept simple, and the numbers are all rounded off so they can be remembered. (The U.S. Energy Department should have done a detailed analysis long ago.)
— The electricity storage capacity required to replace today’s fossil-fueled electricity generation nationwide with intermittent wind and solar is 250,000,000 MWh.
— Assume grid-scale battery facilities cost $300,000 per MWh of storage capacity. (Today’s cost is higher.)
— Thus, the capital cost of this storage is 75 trillion dollars.
— Spreading this cost over 20 years gives an annual cost of 3.75 trillion dollars.
— U.S. household electricity usage is 1.5 trillion KWh per year.
— Thus, the household cost is $2.50 per KWh.
— Average household usage is 10,500 KWh/yr.
— Thus, the annual household cost of this storage capacity is $26,250.
— Today’s average annual electric bill is $1,800.
— Thus, the electricity cost increase is over 14 times as much.
In short, everyone’s electricity bill will be 14 times greater than today if wind and solar replace today’s fossil fuel-powered generation under the Green New Deal.
This will be true of industrial and commercial consumers as well, which will drive up the cost of virtually all goods and services. This impact is truly inflationary.
But this does not include the electrification of transportation and gas heat, which are also part of the Green New Deal. Electrification is often estimated to roughly double the amount of electricity generated.
— Given electrification, the cost of electricity might jump a whopping 28 times today’s cost. The Green New Deal causes the average household electricity bill to go up a crushing $52,500.
Of course, the economy would likely collapse before this happened, but this simple analysis is the necessary starting point for thinking about the incredible cost impact of the Green New Deal.
There are lots of technical refinements to be added to this analysis to make it a good engineering cost estimate. Some make the numbers go down; others make them go up. I would love to see this done and would happily help.
For example, the cost of batteries might go down a lot, and there are studies that project this. Given that the material requirements for this vast number of batteries greatly exceed our present mining and manufacturing capacity, this may be unlikely, but it is not impossible.
On the other hand, this simple analysis assumes batteries charge and discharge from zero to 100% of capacity. If it is actually 10-90 or 20-80, then a great deal more storage capacity will be needed.
Then, too the storage requirement can be reduced by overbuilding the wind and solar generating capacity. However, this reduction is limited; I have been told to 180 million MWh because there is still no solar at night and no wind when it does not blow hard enough.
But it is unlikely that these giant batteries have an average full performance life of 20 years.
Note, too, that this analysis does not include the cost of the enormous amount of wind and solar generating facilities. Nor does it include the cost of borrowing trillions of dollars.
The basic point is that the Green New Deal is impossibly expensive. There is no cure for intermittency.
CFACT
STOP THESE THINGS 
As frightening as David’s analysis appears, it is far too optimistic. At http://vandyke.mynetgear.com/Worse.html I have analyses based on real data for California, Texas, USA as a whole, Denmark, Germany, and EU as a whole. They show that with average renewables’ output equal to average demand, 1,000-2,000 watt hours of storage are needed per watt of average demand. Yes, overbuilding can reduce that. Even Mark Jacobson projects that an all-electric American economy would quadruple present electricity demand. Assuming 100% charge-discharge levels, 100% charge-discharge efficiency, and no cost for transportation, installation, operations, maintenance, decommissioning, destruction, and recycling, the USA cost would be only about four times total GDP — every year — forever.
I tried to do similar calculations for Australia, but the data are a mess, and AEMO doesn’t help.
At https://tupa.gtk.fi/raportti/arkisto/42_2021.pdf Prof. Simon Michaux (Adelaide and Geological Survey of Finland) published amounts of materials necessary for batteries, generators, motors, … for the all-electric economy demanded by the IEA. I used his numbers and calculated that for USA alone, lithium-ion batteries would require 1.6 times more copper than is known to exist, thirteen times more nickel, thirty times more cobalt…. So the project is not only financially impossible, it’s physically impossible.
Details in my book “Where Will We Get Our Energy?” Everything quantified. No vague handwaving. 350 bibliographic citations so you can verify that I didn’t just make up stuff.
With such excellent analysis of this financial debacle, in addition to the solid information available on the deception behind the climate change alarmism, what would be the reason why a politician and his ministers who are responsible for this, to not stop it now? Why isn’t this situation being investigated everywhere in the world for a possible criminal element? The public trust requires that energy be provided as inexpensively as possible and with the utmost care for safety.
The transition to wind and solar power has just about hit the wall, that is the point where the capacity of reliable conventional power runs down to the level of the base load that is required day and night. At that point the grid is in a red zone where the lights will flicker whenever the wind is low at night.
Britain, Germany and South Australia have passed that point and the NEM at large has just arrived there. All the grids where net zero policies are in place are moving towards the tipping point and the surge of AI will reduce the amount of time left to implement an exit from the net zero program.
Texas has got there and they are now subsidising gas so it can survive the competition with subsidised and mandated wind and solar.
The same thing is happening here, two of the three coal burning states in the NEM have thrown in the towel on transition (in action if not in their plans and aspirations) and they are putting coal stations on public life support.