An article I wrote…

When I talk with the ‘professionals’ of the energy field, I am constantly told why solar power cannot meet our needs: The Sun don’t shine 24/7. Valid, strong point. However, there are a few details these professionals are ignoring – battery storage is coming hard.

I understand why batteries get no love – the issue of scale. The Global Electrical/Energy usage is so large that an outside the industry person wouldn’t even grasp the numbers initially. The global energy market is estimated at $6 trillion – the world’s GDP is about $75 trillion. That means energy represents 8% of everything we do in our lives. This is a LARGE amount of money…and it translates into some of the most important global supply chains the species needs. The article above talking about Tesla installing such a large amount of battery storage gives us a bit of data to create perspective – 116MWh of storage versus the US electricity needs (not energy, just electricity) of 4,686,400,000 MWh/year. The US uses about 8,900 MWh/SECOND. We’d need 76 of Tesla’s 2016 installations to meet ONE SECOND of US electricity usage.

We’ve got a long, uphill battle in front of us.

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