While there is a lot of talk about renewables being cheap, Ross McKitrick, Professor of Economics at the University of Guelph in Canada, gives a simple example of why this is not true. He draws a parallel with the building of railways. Suppose, for example, that a country wants to build a railroad from one end of the country to the other, and puts out a tender. Two bids are received, one of which is significantly cheaper than the other. However, the company that submitted the cheaper bid says that after every 10 miles, there is a three mile gap in the track. If such a condition is acceptable, the price is really cheap. “Well, obviously, the fact that it’s cheaper doesn’t help, because it’s now useless as a railroad. And electricity systems that are running on wind are useless for the same purpose. You can’t have an electricity system that when the wind dies down, there’s no electricity,” he says. The same kind of problems are true for solar power as well.
To make the power system work, i.e., to have electricity available all the time with renewables, you need either energy storage capacity or some kind of parallel system of generation. As far as storage is concerned, there are no good solutions at the moment, says McKitrick. One option, he notes, would be to try to create a lake in the sky and pump enough water up there while the weather is windy to use it as a hydro resource in the absence of wind. However, this is not a realistic solution. Another option would be batteries. “No one can even conceive today of how you’d have batteries large enough to run an entire country for anything more than 30 seconds or so,” he says.
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