Battery shortage is affecting U.S. energy, drive to replace fossil fuels with other sources
By Paul Homewood
h/t Dave Ward
What a surprise!!
U.S. renewable energy developers have delayed or scrapped several big battery projects meant to store electrical power on the grid in recent months, scuttling plans to replace fossil fuels with wind and solar energy.
At least a dozen storage projects meant to support growing renewable energy supplies have been postponed, canceled or renegotiated as labor and transport bottlenecks, soaring minerals prices, and competition from the electric vehicle industry crimp supply.
One previously unreported dispute over a delayed California storage project has even wound up in court.
Storing power is considered vital to the expansion of solar and wind energy because it allows electricity generated when the sun is shining or wind is blowing to be used at the end of the day when consumers need it most.
The delays span states including California, Hawaii and Georgia, with battery providers including Tesla and Fluence warning of disruptions to supply, according to a review of regulatory documents, corporate statements and interviews with project developers and power providers.
The delays, some of which have not been previously reported, range from several months to a year, according to the Reuters reporting.
"I have not seen a nascent industry challenged on so many fronts," said Jamal Burki, president of IHI Terrasun Solutions, the U.S. energy storage arm of Japanese heavy equipment maker IHI Corp.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/energy/battery-shortage-affecting-u-s-energy-fossil-fuels
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Off/T
The Express is predicting 35C next week (not quite a daily record for June), and the hottest June heatwave for over 100 years – we are well used to their crazy weather forecast claims, but BBC radio had already started repeating the story in panic mode last night, hottest June evah. Looks like it will be warm/hot from midweek for 5-7 days, doesn’t look historic, but sooner or later the Express will be right! Monkeys, typewriters etc.
Indeed, I see Nathan Rao is still churning out his hype and feverishly coloured-in maps. E.g:
“A scorching African plume will sweep into Britain next week via the Continent which is currently melting in unprecedented heat. Southern Britain will bake in the highest temperatures while a cooler breeze in Scotland and the north eases the blowtorch roasting. London and the southeast could top 35C by the end of next week…..” Etc etc…..
Old men used to sit outside the local Mercantile and talk about the weather.
Here’s my contribution: On the left coast of North America, B.C., Wash., and Oregon have had one of the coolest and wettest periods (M/A/M & continuing in June) since the Lewis and Clark Expedition reached the Pacific Ocean on November 15, 1805. Lewis & Clark are famous American explorers.
I’m seeing 31 for London now, down already from what they were forecasting. SW France (where we have a house) is hot and forecast to get very hot but that has been put back a few days now but with higher temperatures. Its not unusual there at this time of year and last year was unusually cold, as was this spring.
Hmm – both Weather Channel & Met Office show nothing higher than 30C for London this Friday – and a considerable drop in temperatures after that. 35C is simply fake news I think.
June has only 60% to go. Is there going to be a similar pronouncement for next month?
Doh!!!!!! Never saw that coming……..Too far ahead of the development curve, it is really rather basic economics, supply and demand.
…. & the clowns in Europe want to ban the processing of Lithium into batteries because they say it is a major health hazard for the workers.
So that will rather spoil the German/EU plan to become the world centre for battery production. Can’t these elite thinkers actually think this stuff through?
Let’s face it, that was an impossible idea without shooting the plan with H&S paperwork.
Most of the German projects are in fact dependent 9n Chinese investors and presumably supply.
It is bloody cold here in Leeds this morning! 62ºF
I am thinking of turning on the gas CH.
‘Storing power is considered vital to the expansion of solar and wind energy because it allows electricity generated when the sun is shining or wind is blowing to be used at the end of the day when consumers need it most.’
‘Considered vital’ by people who don’t understand power generation. Batteries cost money and produce nothing.
‘to be used at the end of the day’ reveals ignorance of scope. Any capacity beyond a few minutes is prohibitive.
‘The slowdown in utility-scale battery installations threatens the pace of the U.S. transition away from fossil fuels’
[citation needed]
‘as the Biden administration seeks to decarbonize the grid by 2035.’
The Biden administration will be gone in <2 years. Hallefriginlujah!
'I have not seen a nascent industry challenged on so many fronts'
It is a bogus industry. There is no business model for it. "Idiots spewing other people's money" is not a business model. It is political corruption. On that front, I'm glad to see delays. But I wonder, are all the delays really due to there being no business model for the 'industry' in the first place?
The ‘globalisation’ of Victorian scientific and industrial methods has inevitably led to the continuation of the evils of ‘slavery’ in the third world. Most of the world’s electricity is still produced by boiling water to produce steam. And battery techology is limited by chemical laws estabilshed in the 19th century. For the last 90 years, academics have sat in vory towers, masturbating over wave equations and producing little in terms of real economic progress. So called ‘capitalists’ have embraced continued slavery as it has led to a boom in yachts and expensive whores and little else – a return to the sterile policies of the French Court in the 18th century. And we know how that ended!
There is not a single ‘modern’ capitalist that can stand comparison with Edward Pease and George Stephenson and his son Robert. Their vision and drive overcame all obstacles to set in place a real economic revolution – not a pathetic sales drive employing third rate actors to advertise junk on television!
Exactly right Merv Hobden. I would add in also Thomas Richardson, cousin of the Peasea, and like them Quakers. Their motive was to create and grow industry to give the poor not needed on the land and huddled in poverty in the cities. They and all the others not allowed to go to university and so they invented the Industrial Revolution.
Now they are universally condemned by the green Liberal Arts graduates as the destroyers of the Earth. I remain a huge fan of those non-Conformists and share their dream and I am a real capitalist of their kind, but not one of the modern rapacious pirates in “the City”. Right now the greens, neo-Romantics as I think of them, are the ones destroying the Earth – along with excessive population.
REAL capitalism has never been tried.
Great post. Hard to know when and how hard if your business models depends on the whims of dopey pols.
Reply to GC
Malcolm, The Quaker financiers that bankrolled the Industrial Revolution took on more than simple financial risk. Failure meant incarceration in Debtors Prison for possibly the rest of your life if the debt could not be cleared as there was no limited liability act.
However, they were recycling short-term debt to Moneylenders at 25-30%, the product of the failed property boom during the Napoleonic Wars. This was recycled at 3-5% over 25 – 30 years and Pease and Richardson had a huge investment cash flow which as good Quakers they put to work in the nascent industrial growth in manufacturing and transport. We enjoy the huge benefits this technical change has produced.
Sadly, by the 1870s, like the man on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, the enterprise had fallen amongst thieves! The endless cycle of ‘boom n’ bust’ began which continues down to the present day.
The terms ‘entrepreneur’ and ‘millionare’ were French terms of abuse generated by the market scam in 1720s called the Louisiana Plantation and were directed at those who became wealthy trading shares on the Quay D’Orsay, which became worthless paper when the scam collapsed.
So, Gamecock, real capitalism has been tried and was successful – what we currently have is merely, ‘bubble economics’ that has never been successful and never will be.
Exactly so Merv. Richardson founded a bank with Overend and Gurney which became the biggest in the world. They helped found many new industries and valuable social institutions of which the school that I effectively lived in was largely funded by gifts from them. The grant givers also included the Quaker scientist John Dalton (atomic theory etc) and members of the Fry family (chocolate). Their way of doing capitalism worked brilliantly and benefitted society as a whole. They (and other none conformists like the Methodists etc) saw the rebuilding of new housing and slum clearance.
But within 50 years the Quakers had been largely replaced by the social “cheats” like those we know all too well around us today who run their enterprises to get rich and harvest their wealth off “us” as according to Hayek, Friedman and Rand etc.
We have to return to Quaker Economics if we want to save our civilisation.
Oh, dear. Those naughty 7 year old lads working in the lithium mines in the Congo are not working hard enough. double their shift and half their wages. And while you’re at it, pull down another slave trader statue…
I think you’ve summed-up perfectly, the hypocrisy of these times.
i think you’ll find thats Cobalt but point well made
Correct, Nicholas, I should have said cobalt.
A couple w/ a young child bought a house on the street next to mine last winter. I noticed 2 cars with Florida plates including a brand new plug-in Jeep in the driveway. The Jeep was always plugged into an outlet at the base of a lamppost. I wondered about that car w/ our winters. Early this spring, it was replaced with a bright blue Jeep and no plug-in. Finally I met them one morning as I walked. I asked about the plug-in Jeep. They said it was fine for short trips around where they had lived in warm FL, but not here with hilly conditions and cold.
I mentioned how much I liked the Trump sticker on their cars and listed the people in the neighborhood who shared their sentiments…..myself included.
I am not a technical person, but batteries do not seem to be the answer, partly due to the forecast imminent shortage of minerals required for their manufacture, and the above mentioned scandalous immoral manipulation of poor people to mine the dangerous materials. Why, when we have to pay £millions to turn off the Windfarms when they produce too much and dump the power, can’t they store this excess in a different way. I know there must be a power loss, but if this energy is otherwise being totally wasted, as well as costing us gigantic sums, why not use it to electrically pump water into large towers, and when extra energy is required when the wind doesn’t blow, let it out through a generator; lots of mini hydro power units. I am sure you will tell me it has already been tried and doesn’t work………
Yup that works just needs a shed load of concrete and steel to build them with all the CO2 those products need which are also getting into short supply. Then the biggest issue will be the planning and environmental delays bolstered by Nimbys so may get a few in the ground by 2030.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station
It’s not practical, we have some pumped hydro in the UK that takes advantage of the landscape so was more economically viable to build. It is massive, even so it is only good for short bursts. It’s like the crazy schemes to run weights up and down old mine shafts or hills on rails as storage, sounds great, until you do the maths. Might be useful for a few minutes load balancing but you could never build enough to store for a windless week – the cost and scale is prohibitive.
“The Biden administration this week announced it would waive tariffs for two years on panels from countries impacted by a Commerce Department investigation, ”
I may have read this wrong and I’m more than happy for someone to correct me/explain, but doesn’t this sentence from the article mean that Brandon is ready to do easy deals with dodgy countries?
The issue was “prompted by a petition from a domestic solar panel manufacturer, California’s Auxin, alleging that panel manufacturers in the four countries in question are building solar panels using Chinese components to circumvent anti-dumping tariffs”
The 4 companies are Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam. Thus, the concept of “dodgy” gets passed back to China, where the USA acquires most of its goods.
Insofar as the JB Administration has internalized the axiom of “evil CO2”, nothing else matters. It is all chaotic, so it is not possible to explain anything they do.
“I have not seen a nascent industry challenged on so many fronts”
It’s not a nascent industry mate. Windmills were abandoned many years ago because they couldn’t power a modern society, even then.
Biden has shot the industry in both feet because of his hell for leather rush to get it done in the only term he’ll have.
Societal revolutions just don’t happen overnight. Had the world embarked on a 100 year project to electrify humanity, it might have worked, but I doubt it.
Instead, we’re in an incredibly perilous situation with the world economy on its arse and the globalists playing God with people’s lives.
Sorting out this mess will take 100 years.
The problem with grid scale battery storage is a simple one.
It’s expensive.
Really expensive.
How are the organizations building these storage systems going to make any money? They will have to be given some large slabs of cash for the electricity that they store. This could either be an absolute subsidy, or else be given a free rein to charge what they need for the electricity they supply. Otherwise, other generators in the grid will simply undercut them and they will go out of business.
All I see is bad news for electricity customers – ever higher bills.
As a master electrician I have seen the failings and dangers of batteries. The use and takeover to “save the planet” is one of governments biggest scams. We have seen and heard all the attributes, but nothing of the negative side. The average person assumes they are great and the answer to saving the world. After all the hype delivered by their favorite newscaster is all they need to know. why bother with any research. After all we must have two incomes to support a household. with all the sports activities our kids require to be popular, leaves just enough time to stop at the FFP and get home to feed the family’s daily requirement of government set vitamin enhanced fast food plug in the car and head for all the bad news from around the world. But wait what is that odd smell coming from the garage? as you go to find out your super sized TV is blinking strangely. reaching the garage the dam door knob is hot ! A blast of flame singes your eyebrows and you run for your cell phone you forgot to plug in. finding it dead you screen for the kids to call 911. they don’t respond because they have their ears plugged into their video games. you grab your landline and call. your put on hold because of the police budget cuts. You lucked out because a neighbor saw the flames and called already. The firemen arrive and perform their well rehearsed drills and put out the fire. acrid smoke filling the neighborhood . Some of the neighbors sitting with the EMS with oxygen masks on. Well you got lucky and no one was hurt. A night at a motel and you are ready to see the damage. Then more bad news. you didn’t have your car listed on a separate flyer on the insurance policy’s. You didn’t read the fine print you got when you got the car telling of the dangers of charging in an enclosed spaces. Your insurance won’t cover it. Then as you think you have all the bad news. you get several letters from lawyers suing for medical bills caused by the dangerous fumes from the burning battery. Yes the story is fiction, or is it? Time to find out. ever notice your cell phone hot as you take it from your pocket? It is the same type of battery used in many of these cars.———Grampa
N.Mullan, right on the money! Many years ago I was working for a company that was looking at prisioner tagging, which used lithium ion batteries. We had a demonstration of what could happen if the battery was short-circuited. It was like a small hand grenade! I suggested that the problem of prisioner absconding could be solved – if the prisioner went out of the range of the transmitter, the battery could be short-circuited, blowing the leg off! This not serious suggestion was met with cries of horror by sales and marketing….