Wrong way around

Over the Christmas holidays wind power generators in the United Kingdom were paid more than $1.5 million to unplug their turbines from the electricity grid. It seems a steady, stiff breeze blew off the North Sea for much of the time producing lots of power—but power it couldn’t use. The British, it turns out, haven’t yet figured out how to adjust their lives and economy to consume electricity around the vagaries of the wind.

Britain, like many other jurisdictions around the world including Ontario, have run ahead erecting an intermittent electricity generating capacity, lavishing public dollars upon developers and manufacturers without first solving the basic problem of electricity storage. Like dogs who chase cars—it seems they didn’t have a plan once they achieved their goal.

Electricity was little more than a natural curiosity for much of human history—only harnessed within the last 300 years—and only becoming an essential component of our daily lives in the last 150 years.

Still we haven’t yet learned how to store electricity in quantities that are meaningful to the grid that supplies our homes, businesses and industries. We must generate electricity the split second we need it. It is a precise and frankly amazing engineering and technological feat by which grid operators balance ever-changing demand with a moving array of generators.

Like a symphony conductor, the grid operator draws upon a mix of energy sources, each with its own ability and idiosyncrasies. Together it works.

Intermittent energy sources, on the other hand, are like the drunken bassoon player who stumbles on stage and knocks over the entire wind section. The result is chaos.

It is not just the U.K. that is suffering a hangover from its indulgence in intermittent electricity generation. Every jurisdiction that has dabbled in wind and solar is trying to figure out how to store it. They understand this house of cards will come tumbling down once the costs are fully understood and taxpayers learn how little useful energy is actually produced this way.

Sweden uses Denmark’s wind energy to pump water up a hill and then captures it in hydro turbines on the way back down again. It is a terribly inefficient way to produce electricity. But that’s okay because Sweden earns cap and trade credits for taking Danish power— thus allowing it to export more North Sea crude oil and stay onside with the convoluted rules by which the Europeans delude themselves with green righteousness.

Portugal has experimented with arrays of massive flywheels—like those at Ameliasburgh museum—with little success. Others have tried compressed air.

Billions are being spent on battery technology, though some believe another element on the periodic table will need to be discovered before this form of electricity storage technology can play a meaningful role in the supply of utility-scale electricity.

Last week the U.S. government quietly announced it had invested three-quarters of a billion dollars in a company that is working to store energy in molten salt using a vast array of mirrors at a desert solar installation in California. The Obama administration didn’t trumpet the technology investment; rather, it pointed to potential jobs that could be created. If it works.

Obama is already under fire for losing half a billion dollars of public funds on a now-bankrupt solar panel manufacturer. His officials hope doubling down might redeem his record on the energy file. It is a risky bet.

In the meantime, places like the U.K. and Ontario must find new and creative ways to dump their intermittent energy—energy they paid a very high price to generate. In the U.K. the grid operator pays wind and solar generators to disconnect from the grid. In Ontario we spent more than $35 million last year paying neighbouring states and provinces to take our surplus electricity off our hands.

It is nutty. Yet it will get worse.

Even the most fervent believer in wind and solar energy must acknowledge that we’ve got this business the wrong way around.

Before we erect one more industrial wind turbine on someone’s landscape, or another farm field is covered with solar panels, let us first sort out how we might harness this energy and store it. Otherwise we are just paying people to make it and paying other people to take it off our hands. It’s a bad, bad business.

Let’s first figure out what we might do with the car before we continue to chase it down the road.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca