‘Net Zero’ Grid Batteries Alone Would Bankrupt America
Authored by Craig Rucker via AmericanThinker.com
Senate Budget Committee chairman Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) cites “the climate crisis” at almost every opportunity. President Biden calls it a greater threat than nuclear war. They and their allies champion “carbon-free” electricity generation by 2035 and nearly fossil fuel–free energy by 2050.
Achieving “net zero” carbon dioxide emissions will be painless, they assure us. Costs will be so low that you’ll need a magnifying glass to see them. Governments merely have to enact mandates and provide subsidies, and the transformation to “clean” energy will just happen. Almost like in a fairy tale.
Here in the real world, however, we would need millions of weather-dependent wind turbines, billions of equally unreliable solar panels, millions of half-ton battery modules for vehicles, billions more modules to back up intermittent electricity generation, millions of transformers, and tens of thousands of miles of new transmission lines.
All these technologies must be manufactured from metals, minerals, and petroleum extracted from the Earth, via mining on scales unprecedented in human history. The dollar costs alone — just for a U.S. transformation — are almost incomprehensible.
Science and policy analyst David Wojick calculated that just the batteries needed to back up wind and solar electricity generation in a “net zero” USA would cost $23 trillion — America’s entire 2021 gross domestic product (GDP) — and probably many times that.
Energy and technology consultant Thomas Tanton found that battery backup to replace current U.S. fossil fuel electricity — and convert vehicles, furnaces, water heaters, and stoves to electricity — would cost at least $29 trillion in initial outlays.
Trillions more would be needed to cover financing, repairs, maintenance, replacements, burying broken and worn-out non-recyclable equipment, and building systems strong enough to survive hurricanes. Professional engineer Ken Gregory determined that grid-backup battery costs could reach $290 trillion (12.6 times the USA’s 2021 GDP), based on actual 2019 and 2020 hourly intermittent electricity generation data, rather than annual average data utilized in the other studies. None of these estimates includes the costs of turbines, panels, transmission lines, or transformers.
