What Passes For A "Demonstration Project" Among Our Government Geniuses

October 19, 2023 Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian

A couple of days ago, a Substack called Doomberg had a piece titled “False Utopia.” The piece featured a discussion of a post of mine from February 2023 with the title “We Must Demand A Demonstration Project Of A Mainly Renewables-Based Electrical Grid.” My post argued that we should demand a demonstration project of a mainly renewables-based electrical grid that would include all the key elements — generation mainly from solar and wind, plus sufficient back-up or storage to make the whole thing work for the long term without involvement of the evil fossil fuels, plus any other necessary elements to make the whole thing work.

The Doomberg guys called my post “brilliant,” which is very flattering. I would not say it was brilliant, but only that it says obvious things that for some reason few other people are saying. Among the people who will definitely not mention the need for an all-element fossil-fuel-free renewable grid demonstration project are government officials and green energy advocates. The reasons they won’t mention this need could be:

1. they are not bright enough to understand the subject, or
2. their understanding is impaired because they are too blinded by religious fervor to “save the planet,” or 
3. they are intentionally deceiving the public to make money or fame or career advancement for themselves. 
4. Or it could be all three!

Meanwhile though, the government “net zero” or “Green New Deal” (or whatever they are currently called) promotional sites are full of talk of things they call demonstration projects. So are they responding to my demand? The opposite. All of what they call demonstration projects follow a common approach, which is only to attempt to demonstrate various portions of the full system that would be needed to provide reliable 24/7/365 electricity from predominantly wind and solar generation.

Consider for instance the latest news on energy storage. A few days ago on October 13, the Department of Energy announced big new grants and subsidies for a series of what they call “hydrogen hubs.” Here is a report from E&E News Energy Wire. Excerpt:

The Department of Energy on Friday announced seven projects that will receive $7 billion to build landmark hydrogen hubs, delivering a major boost to a nascent U.S. industry. The long-awaited move is a key piece of the Biden administration’s climate agenda. On Friday, the White House said it expects the DOE funding to help cut 25 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, roughly equivalent to removing 5.5 million gasoline-powered vehicles from the road each year. “With this historic investment, the Biden-Harris administration is laying the foundation for a new, American-led industry that will propel the global clean energy transition,” said Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm.

According to this further piece from Energy Wire on August 21, the Biden Administration has set a goal of having the U.S. produce 10 million metric tons of “green” hydrogen (by electrolysis from water) by 2030. The E&E piece states that the massive funding for “hydrogen hubs” is coming from a part of the Energy Department called the “Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations,” and also cites the Department as calling the hydrogen hubs “demonstrations.” So this must be the demonstration project we are calling for!

Not quite:

DOE envisions the hydrogen hubs as a demonstration of production, storage, transport and consumption.

I guess at least this is intended to be a demonstration of more than just production of the hydrogen. But still, they are clearly leaving out the critical piece of the puzzle, which is the demonstration of how much of this hydrogen, and capacity to make more of it, will be needed, and at what cost, to get the country — or even some small town — through a full year (or two or five) without need for fossil fuel backup. That completely obvious elephant is not part of this multi-billion dollar “demonstration.”

And DOE is not putting all of its energy storage eggs in the hydrogen basket. They separately have another big bucks effort called the “Long Duration Storage Shot” that is throwing bucketsful of cash at various research efforts into batteries. But the battery efforts are even farther removed from any relevant demonstration project. From DOE’s opening webpage describing that initiative (with a date of September 2021):

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Energy Earthshots Initiative aims to accelerate breakthroughs of more abundant, affordable, and reliable clean energy solutions within the decade. Achieving the Energy Earthshots will help America tackle the toughest remaining barriers to addressing the climate crisis, and more quickly reach the Biden-Harris Administration’s goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 while creating good-paying union jobs and growing the clean energy economy. . . . The Long Duration Storage Shot establishes a target to reduce the cost of grid-scale energy storage by 90% for systems that deliver 10+ hours of duration within the decade.

On September 22, 2023 the Administration announced some $325 million for “15 projects across 17 states and one tribal nation” to “accelerate the development” of these “long duration” battery technologies. The $325 million may seem rather paltry compared to the $7 billion just thrown at the hydrogen hub thing last week; but don’t worry, they have many billions more to spread around on this over the coming months.

So are these battery technologies, or any one of them, even a potential solution to the problem of making a mostly wind/solar electricity grid work without fossil fuel backup? Again, you will not find any mention at those links, or at other government or advocate sites discussing the issue of how many of these batteries would be necessary and at what cost to actually fully back up a predominantly wind/solar grid and make it into a functional 24/7/365 electricity system. Indeed, you will not find any mention at any such sites of the fundamental problem with all batteries as the means to back up an intermittently-supplied grid, as identified in the big (and otherwise badly flawed) Royal Society energy storage report that came out in September. 

That problem is that stored energy as the backup mechanism entails engineering requirements that no battery can ever meet. Those include: 

1. holding at least several months of average usage,
2. being capable of keeping that energy in storage for years in anticipation of worst-case once every multiple decades wind “droughts,” and being capable of discharging over the course of months if not a full year. 

The “10+ hours of duration” mentioned as the goal of the Energy Department’s battery program is almost trivial against the real engineering requirements.

Hydrogen, by contrast, has the theoretical capability of meeting all of those engineering requirement. However, there are many elements that don’t currently exist that would be needed to make a fully-functioning wind/solar/hydrogen storage 24/7/365 electricity grid. These include not just the electrolyzers, but also storage for huge amounts of hydrogen (underground caverns?), a full collection of thermal power plants capable of meeting peak demand burning pure hydrogen, and a transport system (pipelines?) to take the hydrogen from the electrolyzers to the storage caverns and then on to the power plants.

I could do a back-of-the-envelope calculation on this to get a rough idea as to cost, which would come to a multiple (not necessarily a huge one, but nonetheless a multiple) of what our current electricity system costs. But I’m not going to do it. The reason I’m not going to do it is that there as an obvious fact that tells you all you need to know, which is that no one in the country is spending their own private money to build out this system. They are all waiting for the government handouts. If this system could be built profitably at a cost competitive with what we have, there would be investors falling all over themselves to build it. When Thomas Edison built his first electricity plant, he did not go to the government for handouts to build it.

Because this is all a fantasy kept alive by government handouts, as soon as the handouts go away or even slow down, the whole thing will dry up and fade away.