She says the use of technologies including biofuels, green hydrogen, pumped hydropower, electricity demand management and a small amount of natural gas are in plans to decarbonise electricity grids while keeping electricity supply affordable and reliable. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. For more information see our Privacy Policy. Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. Reeve says batteries help keep electricity grids in balance and they may occasionally have to pick up shortfalls in supply of wind and solar but they will not be alone in that task. “It’s a bit like adding up all the world’s supply of chocolate biscuits and then adding the calories that people need and then saying everyone’s going to starve because there aren’t enough biscuits,” says Alison Reeve, a climate change and energy expert at the Grattan Institute. Batteries are not being deployed to provide backup for the whole electricity supply nor are they the only technology that will allow electricity grids to become almost carbon-free. The conclusion any observer might reach here is that batteries can’t possibly provide enough cover for renewable energy.Īustralians have heard this argument deployed by some commentators – and the opposition leader, Peter Dutton – when talking about big battery projects in South Australia and Victoria.īut this argument is mostly a strawman. By the end of this decade we will have 11 minutes.” “Right now,” Lomborg said, “the world has batteries to store enough electricity for one minutes 15 seconds. Flat battery claimsĭuring the interview, Brand asked Lomborg why you couldn’t store solar and wind power for the times when the sun didn’t shine or the wind didn’t blow. Lomborg has rejected their concerns and has continued to use the figure to bolster an argument that net-zero policies will be too expensive to society. The $11,000 figure was left out of the main study because the authors said the modelling that produced it was not reliable once economies started to cut emissions by more than 80%. The problem with Lomborg’s argument is the authors of that study have been asking him for 18 months to stop using that figure as they said it was a misrepresentation of the findings, with one saying Lomborg’s continued use of it was “obscenely reckless”. Lomborg told Brand: “One study in Nature magazine showed the average American by mid-century, if we actually tried to do the Biden plan to cut emissions to net zero by 2050, would cost in the order of $11,000 per person per year. He says climate change is real and caused by humans but its impacts are overblown, the policy responses to it are inefficient and expensive and the world has bigger problems to solve. Lomborg has been a regular commentator on climate change and energy in conservative circles for more than a decade. The Guardian commentator and environmentalist George Monbiot wrote last week that Brand had seemingly shifted from “challenging injustice to conjuring phantoms”.Ī charismatic figure who had helped energise young people disillusioned by politics was now wasting his talent on “tired and discredited tales”, Monbiot said. During the segment on Brand’s “Stay Free” show, viewed 315,000 times in the four days after it was published, Lomborg argued that renewable energy was too expensive and appeared to try to undermine the role that batteries play in storing renewable energy.
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