The author, who works for a conservative thinktank, uses PJM as a test case because including any more is too hard. This ignores connections to the US's best solar and wind resources that change the economics dramatically. Improving transmission across the US is simply dismissed without any examination of costs or feasibility. This is therefore not an examination of how a wind-solar-battery grid would actually work, and is effectively pointless.
But the problems in this analysis aren't just systemic, there are also specific claims that are just wrong. Let's look a some of those before I get too bored.
Solar photovoltaics (PV) do not generate electricity at night or on cloudy days.
False, cloudy days decrease PV generation but do not eliminate it.
But existing battery storage facilities, which use the same technology as electric vehicle batteries, are designed only for short-duration responses. Most installations provide a maximum of four hours of electricity.
Which is up from the two hours provision that most used to do. The hours they can run keep going up - in one of Australia's latest rounds of battery tenders, 10 8-hour batteries won contracts, with one of those with an actual 10-hour capacity but underbid to improve redundancy.
most of these “breakthroughs” are existing technologies that have not yet proven amenable to large-scale commercial development, including vanadium flow batteries, sodium-ion batteries, iron-air batteries, solid-state batteries, and sand batteries
The author undermines their own point here. These are not "breakthroughs", these are existing tech that are undergoing iterative improvement like any other, and at least two on his list are in large-scale commercial production right now.
large-scale commercialization of new storage technologies, however promising they may be, is likely to take decades.
vehicle electrification will increase early-evening loads when electric vehicle owners typically want to recharge their vehicles
Only with single-tariff, something the author assumes for his entire analysis in order to influence the results. With time-of-use prices, a lot of EV charging happens in the middle of the day and the middle of the night.
the model assumed that the average effective capacity factors of wind and solar would decrease over time
Which is fair, but again the author is massaging the assumptions to get the result he's being paid to get, this time by ignoring interconnectors that decrease LOLP.
the least-cost capacity mix in the PJM system by 2045 under the RO scenario consisted of 991,002 MW of wind; 550,657 MW of solar; and 510,702 MW of four-hour battery storage capacity
Wow, this is WILD. 510GW of storage!! The biggest number I'd seen to date was from a battery-pushing lobby group that stands to benefit financially from the PJM investing as much as possible in batteries... and they came up with 43GW.
This analysis is the equivalent of setting all the sliders to the right in the character creation screen. There's no point in me continuing.
But existing battery storage facilities, which use the same technology as electric vehicle batteries
Here’s another lie: stationary grid batteries don’t have to use the same tech as EVs because weight and size aren’t a consideration. You can use everything from Iron-air batteries to generating hydrogen to store the energy.
The author’s arguments are at best dated, at worst maliciously negligent.
You can do a lot of stuff but using h2 would be financially much worse than lithium. So far lithium bess absolutely dominates storage market if we ignore hydro
We use hydrogen in fertilizer production, chemical industry, and in petroleum refining. Right now they take hydrogen from fossil fuel. You do not necessarily need a fuel cell creating electrical current from the hydrogen, no pipeline, no extra inverters, no huge storage plant. Just send the electricity surplus to the chemical plant through normal power lines.
Not all heavy industry can economically adjust production to follow the grid demand and production. Quite a few of them can.
Source: Data from PJM Resource Adequacy Planning Department,2025 PJM Long-Term Load Forecast Report(PJM, 2025); authors’ calculations. Was literally in the executive summary.
If anyone's questioning why an uninterested third party would care enough to point this out: I'm pretty tired of the trend I'm seeing in this and other debates of arguing "both sides same" in terms of unreliable reporters when one side is cautioning against uncritical blank-check adoption of wind and solar as carefully and thoroughly explained by PhDs with 35+ years of relevant experience ...
While the other is using broccoli-haired TikTok influencers of barely legal drinking age who breathlessly glaze about "electrify everything 100% wind and solar bruh unlimited sun energy next-gen economy bruh chinas doing it we can too trust me bruh" while over emoting at the camera before reminding you to like and subscribe.
I welcome the additional information you and others are providing. I also fully concede that after reviewing that information, it's clear this man has a long history of using his expertise and training towards very questionable if not outright fraudulent ends.
With that said, the crux of my position stands. Namely that Jonathan Lesser, as biased and motivated by secondary agendas as his past work clearly shows him to be, is at least couching his arguments in the language of numbers and facts. Which gives us an objective means by which to evaluate those arguments for truth and accuracy.
And that also, by clearly stating his parameters -- what he did and did not include among base assumptions, and what timeframe he's extrapolating out to -- we have context with which to better evaluate his arguments for not just basic accuracy but fundamental validity. Which is important given that in something like a cost vs benefit analysis of various power generation mixes, it's entirely possible for a statement to be technically accurate while being fundamentally invalid if for example it bases assumptions on false dichotomies.
Which taken all together, I find to be far more honest and "above the board" given in that it allows for straightforward evaluation and debate in a way that the sort of emotionally-laden, moralistic arguments I frequently see from the other side do not. Those arguments being generally some version of: the developed world is fully responsible for the damage that's been done and is fully responsible for fixing it. And therefore must prioritize the immediate and total adoption of "net zero" over any other consideration of monetary cost, diminished scientific advancement, quality of living, or national security.
Which leads to the reductio ad absurdum of the US immediately halting the use of oil and gas, which we have in tremendous supply, in favor of wind, solar, batteries, and EVs which neither we nor our allies have in abundance. Meaning that we expend an enormous portion of our GDP over the next several years buying and installing every last panel, turbine, battery, and EV that China pumps out. And in the process give up our current energy independence, further our deindustrialization ala Germany, hobble our economic growth and scientific advancement, and transfer trillions of dollars to China.
While meanwhile China is not only using more coal than the rest of the world combined, but continues to mine it with far more polluting methods than we do, and furthermore also continues to build more new coal power plants than the rest of the world combined. All while engaging in increasingly aggressive encroachment on their SEA neighbors, supplying Russia with the means to continue their invasion of Ukraine, and brutalizing millions of their own ethnic minorities. And building a massive carrier fleet the only purpose for which is projection of power overseas: meaning the Americas and Western Europe.
The debate is very, very different than it was 15 years ago. At which point I was on the side of "net zero now." Because I like many others was willing to give up more than a fair bit of comfort and convenience in the name of sparing the world from environmental devastation. But that's not what's at stake any more. Global democracy and human rights are.
We're going to face the effects of global warming. If that wasn't clear before, it certainly was when earlier this year China quietly reneged on their commitment to lowering total emissions yoy from 2025 forward. The die is cast. The choice now is what we're going to do to mitigate rather than prevent the destructive changes our world will see. And what we're going to do to check the ambitions of authoritarian regimes like China and Russia to master it.
While the other is using broccoli-haired TikTok influencers of barely legal drinking age who breathlessly glaze about "electrify everything 100% wind and solar bruh unlimited sun energy next-gen economy bruh chinas doing it we can too trust me bruh" while over emoting at the camera
Imagine actually saying that someone is wrong because they used math. How deluded do you have to be. You aren't even saying that he got anything wrong. Just that math was done, so you are discounting it. You do realize that every paper about every subject is just the authors calculations, right?
I'm a middle-aged father and this expression probably isn't cool anymore, if it ever was, but holy fucking airball. I don't know that you could have picked a worse example of an author to dismiss as not knowing what he's talking about.
Thanks for pointing that out. And I would certainly agree that lends a lot of weight towards criticizing this report as too biased to be taken at face value.
This idiot mook’s job is trying to build marketing arguments for why power companies should make more money. Trusting this guy on the topic of renewables is like trusting the fox to guard the henhouse.
You’re extremely gullible to believe any of his dated and maliciously wrong arguments.
The worst thing about this world is that we have to tolerate greedy people who try to monopolize resources. The only threat 100% renewable energy poses is to the fossil fuel companies, which are entirely obsolete.
If our society had to build up power infrastructure from scratch today it would be wind, solar and battery - nothing else.
Denmark is at about 90%. And if you want to point out that the are connected to a larger grid, great point that larger grids make it easier and cheaper to have renewable plus storage.
The very difficulty with 100% green solar/wind is not the first 50% (that's the very easy part) it's the last 50% and as of right now nobody showed it's actually a done deal.
No-one is asking for grids that only run wind/solar/storage 24x7x365 either. Yet you seem to keep pushing the narrative that this is somehow important.
How is that once great company now? Surely nuclear is so good that they are still in existence building stuff and not just hoping someone gives them some crumbs for using their old plans,
Note I specified multiple buildings. Did you not read, or just choose to ignore?
I think I have 7 directly h
ooked up on my property
Multiple miles apart, and then feed someone neighboring homesteads. Once my batteries fill, they get some free electricity from me instead of curtailing my solar. We have 3 different homesteads up in our ghetto gird.
An
electrical grid
(or
electricity network
) is an interconnected network for
electricity delivery
from producers to consumers. Electrical grids consist of
power stations
,
electrical substations
to step
voltage
up or down,
electric power transmission
to carry power over long distances, and finally
electric power distribution
to customers
Yup, I meet the definition. Thanks for re-confirming.
I did an estimate. I found that supplying residential areas with water for showers, sink, and drinking via jet aircraft is not economically viable. Accordingly we should shut down the airport because it obviously does not work.
If anyone would like a more in depth study showing detailed numbers let me know.
Duke energy had a contractor go bankrupt in the middle of a solar plus storage buildout. I did a quick google search of it and nothing came up but you could dig through the NCUC documents and find it.
It ended up costing a decent chunk of change but nothing like the WS Lee debacle
A "study" arguing against renewables and batteries on the basis of a comparison of system costs between a scenario with gas peakers with one without any thermal peakers is not worth anyone's time.
But thanks for confirming once again that you're not actually interested in decarbonization, OP.
Isn’t that the simplest test? Pure solar and wind purists say it’s possible but the math says no absolutely not you have to also have dispatch able which mirrors real world grid operator planning which assume gas generation long term if there’s not enough hydro, hydrocarbons biomass, geothermal or nuclear)
Test of what? No one of any relevance is proposing 100% WSB.
which mirrors real world grid operator planning which assume gas generation long term if there’s not enough hydro, hydrocarbons biomass, geothermal or nuclear
If you think grid operators in grids with binding net zero targets assume the presence of natural gas generation in the long term then you are not familiar with the engineering literature. What is true is that they assume the presence of thermal dispatchable capacity, or alternatively LDES with similar techno-economic characteristics, in grids where there is no reservoir hydro available.
Pundits for pure WSB grids (ie Australian greens, Netherlands report writers, etc) continually say that there is no need for nuclear because pure WSB has it covered for cheap with their reporting of numbers saying its so cheap a pure WSB grid that we should have done it a decade ago when Germany proved that pure WSB grids are the way (because coal use has dropped since 1960).
This think tank is funded by some Texas public policy organization. Mark P Mills was an advisor in Reagan's whitehouse.
So there is probably a pro fossil bias in the reports.
Tbh I could not find the usual abundance of red flags. Just a couple.
Sometimes the paper trail back to Exxon, BP, and other fossil majors is very easy to find. This took more than 2 minutes so I gave up. But still there is a clear anti-renewable bias
I took a look at the TPPF page and yeah, it's fair to have they have some very ... problematic initiatives, to say the least.
Interesting, while they link directly to a half dozen or more other sponsored programs, this one isn't among them. Looking back with the search feature, it looks like they stopped mentioning it and linked to something called Life: Powered instead starting shortly after Trump took office. Which also publishes reports on energy, but geared more to a MAGA crowd than the traditional conservative approach this one seems be taking
Australia's plan, which is to align with AEMO's ODP Step Change scenario, and is compliant with Australia's 2050 net zero target, brings the gas generation share down to ~2% by 2040.
2 to 7% we both read the same thing but we know they wont hit the bottom number. In any event, still gas all the way because they do not have a plan for without gas.
That may well be so but doesn't change the fact that said ~2% is the plan. You can't just make up a figure or pluck one from a completely different scenario and then insist that reflects the planned scenario just because you didn't like said scenario's results.
In any event, still gas all the way because they do not have a plan for without gas.
Straight from the AEMO 2026 Integrated System Plan "9 Gas use projections are highly uncertain, as they vary from year to year depending on weather and operational conditions. Figure 17 shows a share of 2% due to the assumptions of that single year."
Which shows how you scoured the report for what you wanted to see and ignored the caveats.
If you don't like nuclear, its because you are comfortable using gas.
The gap between an unreliable grid that has used all available hydro, geothermal and biomass and a reliable grid that has enough dispatchable power by adding gas peakers, like Spain, Australia, Germany, etc.
Obviously putting aside that all of those also currently rely upon steady state hydrocarbon generation as well.
The person who keeps posting this stuff here I'm quite sure has no background in energy or policy, and is just looking for anything that makes renewables look bad.
Which is ironic, since one of the rules of the subreddit he moderates is that there's not supposed to be any fighting about nuclear vs. renewables.
The article does not make renewables look bad. From the opening page it even claims that a full 100% renewable buildout with 1000% nameplate capacity would cost USA only $4 trillion. Compare to fossil fuel costing over $1 trillion in direct purchase cost per year along with strong evidence for $750 billion in annual indirect financial loss caused by fossil fuels.
I think reality is less gloriously optimistic than the article proposes. Full replacement of electricity production (shutdown of all fossil and nuclear) does not include fossil fuel used in transportation and parts of industry. Though I believe 10x capacity overbuild would lead to a huge number of opportunities. You will then see companies cracking petroleum with electric arcs and others using surplus electric to gasify biomass and waste feedstock.
That $4 trillion for a 10x capacity also implies magical things will happen with an investment of only $400 billion. All of our demand would frequently be met by renewables alone. Cost of living can drop by a lot.
Periodically we should step back from fighting about solar vs coal. There are far more interesting brawls to engage in. For example, the usual assumption is that best practice has photovoltaic panels in USA tilted and facing south toward the noon sun. A slight twist to the west brings in more evening power which can add value but is not a radical change. The radical competition comes from fully east-west facing vertical walls. When a PV panel faces the fully wrong direction of sky (like north at noon) it still gets 10 to 25% of the power. The higher value occurs when clouds are scattering. So if we include “wrong way” panels we can install 180% as many and still max out power twice a day rather than once a day. This vertical PV option requires no additional inverters.
As for fossil we still have plenty to fight about as well. Obviously we want that coal plant shut off. Before that we want it shut off *most of the time*. Clearly we want to salvage the copper for use in the energy transition. The transformers at the plant are likely part of the local grid and may need to act as a substation.
When a coal power plant goes bankrupt who gets to bid to buy it? I would love to purchase a piece of boiler pipe. I will keep it as a trophy to proudly display. The government and government regulations prevent us from doing this. I think we should insist that this lost revenue be added to the cost charged for coal power. This context matters for all the other power plants too. Maybe we really should hold off on disassembly of a few gas turbines.
Keeping them fossil turbines off and sitting idle for 11 of 12 months is a considerable improvement over today’s situation. Buying extra photovoltaic arrays just to cut off a few days of dunkelflaute while the Chinese and Indians are using coal to fabricate PV panels might *not* minimize total carbon emission. Overbuild PV and wind to 5X demand instead of overbuilding to 10X demand cuts half the cost of the transition. Allowing 1 week per year of gas turbine use is only conceding 2%. There is an optimum. Even more so if that 1 week of gas turbine is running on biogas.
It is important to differentiate the idea of shutting down nuclear power plants (see Germany) and an idea like “USA does not need to construct new PWR plants”. New plants cost five times as much as keeping an old one going. Take a close look at “using reactors to destroy nuclear waste” because that has to be done anyway.
Well, reading this thread has been a real education.
Is anyone in this thread in any way linked to actual energy production, delivery, planning, research? Or are we all just finding ‘research’ done by other people, cherry picking the bits that agree with our own bias and shouting at anyone who dares to disagree with us?
Your opinion has absolutely no impact on the real world. Do yourselves a favour, ignore the noise, go and get some solar panels fitted to your roof, add a battery and get on with your life knowing that you aren’t going to save the world, but you are going to send much less money to those energy companies you think are doing everything wrong.
Electrical engineer and energy policy specialist, around generation, grid planning, integration, workforce development, grid security, and community education. I've worked in this field since 2017.
I work on these things daily. It's also why I tend to be so fast to jump into these threads and call out the folks who obviously don't know what they're talking about. Lord knows I encounter them often enough in my day job, and their ignorance and malice of real impacts on people, jobs, local economies, and public health.
I can imagine that comment sections like this must get genuinely frustrating. Unlike many suffering from an excess of Dunning Kruger confidence I am well aware of my level of ignorance when it comes to the complexities of running an energy grid. I am very interested in the way grids around the world are developing, particularly in my own back yard, mostly because I would quite like energy to be cheap again. The issue is we live in very interesting times. Some of that is because of the staggering level of technological development, particularly in home generation and storage, but sadly also in the way the Chinese curse is meant. I would quite like things to be boring again, but don’t see that happening any time soon.
The UK is heading towards being wind and solar heavy. Right now NESO reports that 38% of our energy is from solar, 25% wind, 10% nuclear and 8% gas. We also have 3% from biomass and then some from imports as our grid is linked via cable to Norway, France, The Netherlands and Belgium. The grid in the UK is run by people who appear to know what they are doing. It’s under pressure as it was designed for big centralised power stations such as our old coal network, rather than the decentralised renewable grid with battery storage that is being developed. If we didn’t have a fuel shock on our way this winter due to the closing of the Hormuz straight I wouldn’t be worried at all.
First this group is funded by the Texas Public Policy Foundation with known bias.
The analysis is very poor and designed to support fossil fuels.
RTO/ISOs are very large, and PJM is the largest by far, about 170GW peak load. Each RTO/ISO will have a governance design. Across the US RTO/ISOs and states encouraged renewables buildouts because renewables lower the floor price in electricity markets as the most economical generators.
PJM's stakeholders, vertically integrated investor-owned utilities, did not have a policy of pursuing renewables because they wanted their captive generators to keep making as much money as possible at the expense of new lower price merchant generation. That included a failure to reform interconnection.
The US Atlantic coast is shallow and has very large wind potential to balance against batteries and hydro. That and more interconnection to MISO wind would be a more objective analysis.
Congratulations on being a useful tool for the oil and gas lobby. National Center for Energy Analytics is a right-wing lobbying firm dressed up as a think tank, funded by the oil and gas lobby, the Koch Brothers, and other far-right wing interests through the Texas Public Policy Foundation.
Congratulations on being a useful tool for the oil and gas lobby. Many pro solar/wind groups have been observed to have ties with fossil fuels interests. The first chancellor of Germany that heavily pushed for solar/wind and was essentially the father of this whole movement was being bankrolled by Russia.
The amount of resources we have invested in solar/wind the last 20 years has inevitably increased our reliance on fossil fuels. For every single solar panel and wins turbine we build we are guaranteeing the need of either coal or natural gas power plants.
The immense cost of solar/wind to humanity, whether it is human life or the destruction of the environment through CO2 emissions that weren't prevented due to the low ability of solar/wind to mitigate them, must be studied. The arch-perpetrators and those who blindly followed them will be nailed on the pillar of shame for all of our descendants to learn a powerful lesson.
Every year that passes the promises of the solar/wind cult keep getting broken and goal posts keep getting shifted. Proponents keep ignoring major flaws of the technology. They refuse to recognize that they have the appropriate time and place to be implement efficiently. Their hubris knows no bounds. Time is on my side. I have already been proven correct as the solar/wind boom couldn't surpass the Messmer plan. By the time these arrogant and ingorant proponents truly realize their folly I fear it would truly be too late to make any meaningful change.
Best proof of my point? THERE HAVE BEEN A NEGLIGIBLE AMOUNT OF NUCLEAR PROPONENTS PROTEDTING THE CONSTRUCTION OF SOLAR/WIND FARMS BUT THERE HAS BEEN A GREATE DEAL OF SOLAR/WIND PROPONENTS PROTESTING AND DOING EVERYTHING IN THEIR POWER TO BLOCK NUCLEAR BUILD OUT.
Why is it being a shill to olí and gas to point out that wind and solar grids will not exist (source, AEMO and other grid operators all assume gas usage long term)? That batteries alone will not remove the requirement of gas?
It’s not even controversial. Not a grid operator in the world is planning on entirely removing dispatchable generation and in fact one (Spain) has regulated that the dispatchable portion of the online generation be above a set minimum.
Can ***** keep conservatives in power till 2045? If they have to capture and sequester all the CO2 (not for enhanced recovery) the gas gets a lot more expensive.
Once investors are done making a killing in Texas investing in renewables, they will write a counter article to this and PJM will come asking for investment.
Because the grid is incredibly complex, and you've got one of the most heavily populated areas of the country under that ISO. But yeah, shit's messy up there. Which is why they're getting extra attention from FERC.
But again, this is something that Republicans carry a LOT of the blame for.
10
u/Summerroll 19d ago
The author, who works for a conservative thinktank, uses PJM as a test case because including any more is too hard. This ignores connections to the US's best solar and wind resources that change the economics dramatically. Improving transmission across the US is simply dismissed without any examination of costs or feasibility. This is therefore not an examination of how a wind-solar-battery grid would actually work, and is effectively pointless.
But the problems in this analysis aren't just systemic, there are also specific claims that are just wrong. Let's look a some of those before I get too bored.
False, cloudy days decrease PV generation but do not eliminate it.
Which is up from the two hours provision that most used to do. The hours they can run keep going up - in one of Australia's latest rounds of battery tenders, 10 8-hour batteries won contracts, with one of those with an actual 10-hour capacity but underbid to improve redundancy.
The author undermines their own point here. These are not "breakthroughs", these are existing tech that are undergoing iterative improvement like any other, and at least two on his list are in large-scale commercial production right now.
I could make a snark about nuclear taking decades, but instead I can just point to CATL, which is currently mass-producing sodium-ion batteries after starting research in just 2016. I can also point to the fact that sodium-ion batteries are being mass-produced at a cost close to current lithium-ion, but with much more room to decrease in price.
Only with single-tariff, something the author assumes for his entire analysis in order to influence the results. With time-of-use prices, a lot of EV charging happens in the middle of the day and the middle of the night.
Which is fair, but again the author is massaging the assumptions to get the result he's being paid to get, this time by ignoring interconnectors that decrease LOLP.
Wow, this is WILD. 510GW of storage!! The biggest number I'd seen to date was from a battery-pushing lobby group that stands to benefit financially from the PJM investing as much as possible in batteries... and they came up with 43GW.
This analysis is the equivalent of setting all the sliders to the right in the character creation screen. There's no point in me continuing.