Looking For The Official Party Line On Energy Storage - Highlighted Article

From: Manhattan Contrarian

By: Francis Menton

Date: December 8, 2022

Looking For The Official Party Line On Energy Storage

If you’ve read my energy storage report, or just the summaries of parts of it that have appeared on this blog, you have probably thought:  this stuff is kind of obvious.  Surely the powers that be must have thought of at least some of these issues, and there must be some kind of official position on the responses out there somewhere.

So I thought to look around for the closest thing I could find to the Official Party Line on how the U.S. is supposedly going to get to Net Zero emissions from the electricity sector by some early date.  The most authoritative thing I have found is a big Report out in August 2022 from something called the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, titled “Examining Supply-Side Options to Achieve 100% Clean Electricity by 2035.”  An accompanying press release with a date of August 30 has the headline “NREL Study Identifies the Opportunities and Challenges of Achieving the U.S. Transformational Goal of 100% Clean Electricity by 2035.”  

What is NREL?  The Report identifies it as a private lab “operated by Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC, for the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract.”  In other words, it’s an explicit advocacy group for “renewable” energy that gets infinite oodles of taxpayer money to put out advocacy pieces making it seem like the organization’s preferred schemes will work.

Make no mistake, this Report is a big piece of work.  The Report identifies some 5 “lead authors,” 6 “contributing authors,” and 56 editors, contributors, commenters and others.  Undoubtedly millions of your taxpayer dollars were spent producing the Report and the underlying models (which compares to the zero dollars and zero cents that the Manhattan Contrarian was paid for his energy storage report).  The end product is an excellent illustration of why central planning does not work and can never work.

So now that our President has supposedly committed the country to this “100% clean electricity” thing by 2035, surely these geniuses are going to tell us exactly how that is going to be done and how much it will cost.  Good luck finding that in here.  From the press release: (continue reading)

Looking For The Official Party Line On Energy Storage