With much of Florida in energy crisis mode after Hurricane Irma and frustrated Floridians struggling to find gas for cars and generators, Mark P. Mills’ article is particularly timely on the performance gap between energy from wind and energy from liquid hydrocarbons.
“Even if engineers were able to double or quadruple battery efficacy, that still would not come near,” writes Mr. Mills in New Atlantis.
(C)onsider the prospect of replacing gasoline with wind-generated electricity to charge batteries in electric cars. Here, too, there are physics-based barriers to innovation. Building a single wind turbine, taller than the Statue of Liberty, costs about the same as drilling a single shale well. The wind turbine produces a barrel-equivalent of energy every hour, while the rig produces an actual barrel every two minutes. Even though the barrel-equivalent of energy from a wind turbine costs about the same as a barrel of oil, the latter is easy and cheap to store. However, storing wind-generated electricity so that it can be used to power cars or aircraft requires batteries. So while a barrel’s worth of oil weighs just over 300 pounds and can be stored in a $40 tank, to store the equivalent amount of energy in the kind of batteries used by the Tesla car company requires several tons of batteries that would cost more than several hundred thousand dollars.
While a barrel’s worth of oil weighs just over 300 pounds and can be stored in a $40 tank, to store the equivalent amount of energy in the kind of batteries used by the Tesla car company requires several tons of batteries that would cost more than several hundred thousand dollars. Even if engineers were able to double or quadruple battery efficacy, that still would not come near to closing the performance gap between energy from wind and energy from liquid hydrocarbons for transportation.
These stark facts often elicit the response that the alternative technologies will get better with time and scale. Of course they will. But there are no significant scale benefits left, since all the underlying materials (concrete, steel, fiberglass, silicon, and corn) are already in mass production. Nor are there big gains possible in the underlying technologies given the physics we know today.
Read more here.
