The Chisholm Grid project in Houston is touted as one of the world’s largest stand-alone battery storage facilities because it is allegedly capable of providing 100 megawatts to help the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) maintain and stabilize the state’s grid, according to media reports.

“One way to address the natural variability between both solar and wind that puts stress on the grid and introduces some ups and downs to the market is with battery storage,” Michael Giberson, associate professor in energy, economics and law with Texas Tech University’s Jerry S. Rawls College of Business Administration, told the Lone Star Standard. “You buy power when there's extra wind blowing then you sell it when wind dies down.”

But other experts say it is unrealistic to think of battery power as the sole solution to the unreliable weather conditions that renewable energy depends upon.

Charles McConnell | Charles McConnell

As widely reported, below are seven of the many reasons batteries are not the only answer.

Durability. “Batteries have some big problems,” said Robert Michaels, an energy economist and former professor at Cal State Fullerton. “The typical battery can fill your power for about 4 hours, which is not long enough and that’s the problem. The other part is you've got to recharge them.”

Cost. Lithium-ion batteries, in theory, could help improve the reliability of mass-scale wind and solar farms that power the grid but the problem is they don't last long enough and they are not cheaper, according to Michaels. 

“They're very expensive for what you get when you compare the capital cost of the batteries with the capital costs of a natural gas-fired power plant, for example, because batteries basically are not durable,” Michaels told the Lone Star Standard.

Charles McConnell, an energy center officer with the Center for Carbon Management and Energy Sustainability at the University of Houston, concurs on the cost of batteries.

“What strikes me about all the presentations and the marketing information is that the costs for wind and solar generation are always inclusive of production tax credits and investment tax credits that come with those generation sources,” McConnell told the Lone Star Standard. “That's why nobody builds or installs anything unless they do get the subsidies.”

Supply. McConnell further notes that batteries are scarce. 

“You don't have battery backups sufficient to make anywhere close to an apples-to-apples comparison,” he said. “You're always going to require the natural gas facilities to back up the fact that when wind and solar are unable to meet the demand, you have to start the gas plant.”

Competition. If battery development, wind and solar generation were forced to launch without subsidies, Michaels doesn’t believe they’d be able to compete.

“Subsidies means they are able to make revenues and profits that they shouldn’t,” Michaels said in an interview. “Taken by themselves renewables simply can't stand on their own.”

Capacity. National battery and battery capacity currently represent about 4% of the total amount of battery backup that would be required if natural gas and coal plants were completely eliminated, according to McConnell. 

“We are so far away from a full battery storage grid circumstance in our country,” he said. “It's a premise that some people don't realize how far away from that we are in terms of capacity.”

Sustainability. Ramping up battery production is not a simple matter of subsidies, McConnell says, but rather is physically impossible given the amount of materials that would need to be sourced from foreign countries. 

“For us to get the right amount of batteries, we would need to have somewhere between 10 and 15 times the amount of rare earth materials harvested from places like Africa and China, almost exclusively, to be able to make those batteries,” said McConnell in an interview. “We have no energy security in our country in terms of ramping up battery manufacturing because we don't have access to the rare earth materials that are necessary to build these batteries. So, we have virtually little or no battery storage backup.”

Taxes. Making a full commitment to a lower-carbon future will require a carbon tax, according to McConnell. 

“Everybody should understand that it will cost more, but politicians don't do that in our country,” he said. “They claim they're interested in the climate but they won't bring forth the climate bill. People should have a transparent understanding of what it is we're trying to accomplish as a society. When you begin to hide costs and send power bills that are so complicated that people can't even read them, then that tells me there's an agenda going on and the vast majority of the people in the country don't really understand what the impacts are.”