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The Green New Deal Could Make Electricity 28 Times More Expensive

by David Wojick

September 6, 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.

This piece originally appeared at CFACT.org and has been republished here with permission.

Dated: September 6, 2024


Filed Under: Bridging Humanity and the Environment, Climate & Energy, Climate Change and Insurance Industry, Climate Consensus, Climate Policy, Climate refugees, Energy Options, Energy Policy, Global Warming Science, Hurricanes, Sea Level

About David Wojick

David Wojick has a Ph.D. in the philosophy of science and mathematical logic from the University of Pittsburgh and a B.S. in civil engineering from Carnegie Tech. He has been on the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University and the staffs of the U.S. Office of Naval Research and the Naval Research Lab. He is a former consultant with the Office of Scientific and Technical Information at the U.S. Department of Energy in the area of information and communication science.

Comments

  1. M. Valentino says

    September 10, 2024 at 2:26 pm

    David, thank you for a very readable article that can be shared with a wide viewership. I do have a couple of questions for you. According to EIA, U.S. utility-scale electricity generation in 2023 was 4.18 x 10^12 kWh, and of this 60% was from fossil fuels, i.e., around 2500 billion kWh, or 2500 x 10^6 MWh, or 10x what you have above. The 20-year costs should be annualized, accounting for interest and the lowering of utility-scale battery storage over time. (These may be a tradeoff, or reasonably close.) The levelized cost of wind power was just over $25 per MWh in 2022 (per Statista) while Lazard showed an LCOE for onshore wind of between $24 and $75 for 2023. Installation costs for turbines is $1100 to $1700 per MW. Would replacing more nameplate capacity from coal, gas and fuel oil with more turbines — accounting for variation in capacity factors — produce less dire figures? In any case, advancing the GND at breakneck speed is not economically tenable.

    Reply
    • Dean Jackson says

      October 9, 2024 at 8:22 pm

      “Would replacing more nameplate capacity from coal, gas and fuel oil with more turbines — accounting for variation in capacity factors — produce less dire figures?”

      Keep in mind that the solar/wind turbine industries are heavily subsidized by federal and state governments, and the 60% of electricity generated by hydrocarbons ensures a relative steady supply of electricity when solar/wind turbines are down. With no backup batteries present, and 100% of electricity generated by solar/wind turbines, communities will experience periodic blackouts,* with resulting astronomical spikes in costs associated with zero capability to access electricity in communities not affected by blackouts; one cannot order the Sun to produce more radiation, nor the wind to blow harder, whereas with hydrocarbons, they’re right there in storage to be used.
      ————————
      * With solar, blackouts 100% of the time when the Sun goes down, and blackouts when cloudy, cloudy conditions lasting weeks in rare cases. As of 2020, only 6% of residential homes had backup batteries for solar, commercial = 2%. It’s just too expensive.

      Reply
  2. Dean Jackson says

    October 9, 2024 at 3:58 pm

    In the article by David Wojick, “The Green New Deal could make electricity 28 times more expensive”, he observes:

    “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.”

    David Wojick’s cost estimates are based on today’s supply and demand for the constituent minerals that go into the manufacture of backup batteries. Today, in the United States 38.4% of electricity is derived from wind/solar/hydroelectric/nuclear sources, most of which don’t require battery backup because electricity can be borrowed by the existing traditional electricity grid. As global demand increases for battery backup, the costs associated with mineral extraction will skyrocket at least ten-times what the costs are today, where we arrive at an average household cost of…

    10 x $52,500 = $525,000

    It should also be noted that the minerals needed to manufacture the world’s backup batteries to satisfy demand will take approximately 500 years to accomplish, meaning 99.9% or better of humanity will be annihilated.

    Reply

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