from CFACT
David Wojik
Below I'll show how the Green New Deal caused the average household electricity bill to jump by $52,500. The reason is simple. Wind and solar require a lot of backup batteries, and we use a lot of electricity, so the cost of all those batteries is trillions of dollars.
This is the basic derivation. It's kept simple and the numbers are all rounded to make them easier to remember. (A detailed analysis by the U.S. Department of Energy is long overdue.)
— The electricity storage capacity required to replace today’s fossil fuel generation nationwide with intermittent wind and solar is 250,000 megawatt hours.
— Assume a grid-scale battery facility costs $300,000 per megawatt hour of storage capacity. (The cost is higher today.)
— The capital cost of this storage is therefore $75 trillion.
— Spread this cost over 20 years, and the annual cost is $3.75 trillion.
— U.S. households use 1.5 terawatt-hours of electricity annually.
— So the household cost is $2.50 per kilowatt hour.
— Average household electricity consumption is 10,500 kWh/year.
— Therefore, the annual household cost for this storage capacity is $26,250.
— Today, the average annual electricity bill is $1,800.
— As a result, electricity bills increased more than 14 times.
Simply put, if wind and solar replaced today's fossil fuel generation under the Green New Deal, everyone's electricity bill would be 14 times what it is today.
The same is true for industrial and commercial consumers, which will drive up the cost of nearly all goods and services. The effect is truly inflationary.
But it does include the electrification of transport and gas heating as part of the Green New Deal. It is estimated that electrification could roughly double electricity generation.
— Accounting for electrification, electricity costs could be as much as 28 times higher than today. The Green New Deal has caused the average household electricity bill to jump by $52,500.
Of course, the economy will likely collapse before that happens, but this simple analysis is a necessary starting point for thinking about the mind-boggling cost implications of a Green New Deal.
Many technical improvements need to be added to this analysis to make it a good engineering cost estimate. Some make the numbers go down, some make the numbers go up. I'd love to see this done and would be happy to assist.
For example, the cost of batteries could drop significantly, as some research predicts. This is probably unlikely, but not impossible, given that the material requirements for such a large number of batteries greatly exceed our current mining and manufacturing capabilities.
On the other hand, this simple analysis assumes that the battery charges and discharges from 0% capacity to 100%. If it's actually 10-90 or 20-80, more storage capacity will be needed.
Storage needs can then also be reduced by over-building wind and solar generation capacity. However this reduction is limited, I was told it is 180 million megawatt hours, because there is still no solar power at night and no wind when the wind is not strong enough.
But the average full performance life of these giant batteries is unlikely to be 20 years.
Also note that this analysis does not include the costs of large wind and solar generation facilities. It also doesn’t include the cost of borrowing trillions of dollars.
The basic takeaway is that the Green New Deal is incredibly costly. Intermittent and incurable.
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