If you wanted a bill written that was impossible to implement on poorly planned deadlines and outrageously expensive, you’d call a Vermont Democrat. Their track record is hard to beat. But Dems in Maskachusetts are vying for a spot on the podium. Last year they passed a bill mandating better backup facilities NOW, but the language is so screwed up no one knows what exactly is needed NOW, which affects how much it will cost.
Naturally, there is no language making it clear who will pay, so the likely victims of this scam are ratepayers. They were never getting off the hook so this is just more virtue signalling doing business as an act of political force.
“The amount of batteries is somewhat unclear. The Bill specifies that 5,000 Megawatts (MW) of batteries be bought but this is the discharge capacity, that is how fast the batteries can be emptied. The storage capacity is what counts and that is measured in Megawatt-hours (MWh). Specifying MW is like buying juice based on how fast it pours not how much the bottle holds.
This legislative ignorance means that to comply, you will have to do some math, which -as we know – is a handicap resulting from decades of the same sort of people meddling with public education. The Bill reportedly requires devices with discharge times of 4-10 hours.
Almost all grid scale battery systems these days are four hour duration so for simplicity we will start by assuming the whole 5,000 MW buy is four hour batteries.
This gives 20,000 MWh of storage. Battery systems today run around $500,000 per MWh. That gives a total cost of $10,000,000,000 or ten billion dollars which equals roughly 17% of the current state budget. If 10 hour batteries are purchased the cost jumps to $25,000,000,000 or twenty-five billion dollars. The Bill actually calls for a good bit of longer duration batteries as well which makes the cost even higher.”
That’s a lot, and as someone trapped on the same grid, it can’t be too long before the cost of this useless boondoggle finds its way into my bill, even though I’m in a different state because the bill is not clear on who has to pay the billions to meet the mandate.
“These staggering costs and who will pay them will start to come into focus with the rate increase applications that the power companies will have to file. The affected ratepayers should demand an explanation as there is no apparent use for all these thousands of extremely large, expensive and dangerous batteries that will be dotting the landscape in our communities.”
New Hampshire is not littered with these, but a new one is proposed at Portsmouth’s former Schiller Station facility. The old coal fired plant is not meant to be refurbed as a point of entry for Gulf Wind (approved and leased but not yet developed). That seems to have been something the advocates swore would not happen, but Maine lost its DOT grant to do just that. Create a port for OSW. That would require large cables that the fisherman opposed along with Gulf Wind.
At this point, Granite State Power claims its facility would sip power during low usage and let it out when demand peaks. Battery backup to prevent brownouts, but we never had those when nuclear, coal, and gas delivered the power. Blackouts were the product of storms taking down infrastructure, preventing any power from arriving anywhere where it’s not.
As for Massachusetts, it seems unclear why they want these short of political resume padding. You need the power to store, and their plan, like Vermont’s, is unreliable, intermittent production. Billions upon billions in service to a lie that, even if true, makes the gestures meaningless when all the most dangerous emissions are elsewhere.
Consider how that money could be used to expand access to natural gas, propane, over even nuclear. How about technology reducing emissions from gas, propane, and even oil or coal? It would cost less and do more and you would not need to ruin the planet to get the materials necessary to build all these battery stations.
Not part of the plan which is to make rates even less affordable as a sign of obedience to a lie.
