BATTERIES CANNOT SAVE THE GRID OR THE PLANET

摘要

Batteries are a central feature of”new energy economy”aspirations.It would indeed revolutionize the world to find a technology that could store electricity as effectively and cheaply as,say,oil in a barrel,or natural gas in an underground cavern.Such electricity-storage hardware would render it unnecessary even to build domestic power plants.One could imagine an OKEC(Organization of Kilowatt-Hour Exporting Countries)that shipped barrels of electrons around the world from nations where the cost to fill those”barrels”was lowest;solar arrays in the Sahara,or coal mines in Mongolia(out of reach of Western regulators),or the great rivers of Brazil.But in the universe that we live in,the cost to store energy in grid-scale batteries is about 200-fold more than the cost to store natural gas to generate electricity when it’s needed.That’s why we store,at any given time,months’ worth of national energy supply in the form of natural gas or oil.