CLIMATE LEGISLATION, which is pending in the Legislature, is going to be very expensive and offer little bang for the buck.
The legislation, called “An Act promoting a clean energy grid, advancing equity and protecting ratepayers,” has passed the Senate and is awaiting action in the House. During the debate in the Senate, the chair of the committee that helped draft the bill said the measure will drive up the cost of electricity.
“Building out an entirely new electric grid is expensive…real expensive,” he said. “You’ve got the electric grid, offshore wind, storage, lots of costs being brought to bare.”
No dollar figure on the cost has been provided, so I set out to calculate how expensive this self-imposed transition will actually be.
I examined a single measurable part of the legislation mandating that utilities purchase a huge amount of grid-scale batteries between 2025 and 2030. The amount of batteries is somewhat unclear, since the bill specifies that 5,000 megawatts of batteries be bought but this is the discharge capacity, or how fast the batteries can be emptied. The storage capacity is what counts and that is measured in megawatt-hours. Specifying megawatts is like buying juice based on how fast it pours, not how much the bottle holds.
The bill does include a range of storage capacities, which sheds some light on the potential cost. Most of the batteries are called mid-duration, which means they can provide full discharge for four to 10 hours. Almost all grid-scale battery systems these days are of four-hour duration, so for simplicity we will start by assuming the whole 5,000 megawatt buy is for four-hour batteries.
This gives 20,000 megawatt hours of storage. Battery systems today run around $500,000 per megawatt hour, which yields a total cost of $10 billion, which equals roughly 17 percent of the current state budget. If 10-hour batteries are purchased, the cost jumps to $25 billion. The bill actually calls for a good bit of longer-duration batteries, which would make the cost even higher.
These hugely expensive mandatory purchases will do little by way of supporting the transition to a grid run on solar, wind, and batteries.
The average total electricity usage in Massachusetts is about 5,700 megawatt hours per hour. In a solar, wind, and battery world, 20,000 megawatt hours of batteries lasts just three-and-a-half hours on average windless nights. On deadly cold nights, it’s more like just two hours, then you freeze in the dark. If we also electrify home heat and cars, it is more like a mere one hour.
With $25 billion worth of 10-hour batteries, that one hour changes to two and a half hours, which still leaves you freezing all night. Brutally cold nights are typically windless, including offshore, so this is not a rare case in Massachusetts.
Clearly this tiny bit of storage is useless for backing up solar and wind, but it costs $10-25 billion or more.
In addition to being wildly expensive, the bill is in a great rush. It requires that 1,500 megawatts be purchased by July 31, 2025, which works out to about $3 billion to buy four-hour batteries capable of holding 6,000 megawatt hours of electricity. The cost would be a lot more with longer duration batteries. The bill calls for another 1,000 megawatts by July 2026 and another 1,000 megawatts by July 2027 for many billions more.
Presumably these many billions of dollars will all be paid for by the electricity users of Massachusetts, also known as ratepayers. Increasing electric bills is a highly regressive measure as it hits the poor the hardest, and the claim by the bill’s sponsors that the increase in electricity costs will be offset somewhat by a reduction in natural gas purchases rings hollow.
There are also safety concerns. This much storage will require thousands of container-sized lithium batteries. Each container is an unpredictable fire threat. A number of such fires have already occurred around the country. They are very hot, impossible to extinguish, and they can produce a lot of toxic emissions.
Each container battery weighs around 80,000 pounds, which is about 100 times the weight of an electric vehicle, or EV, battery and is that much more dangerous. Many hundreds of acres of land will be required to site all these containers. The National Fire Protection Association is working on guidelines for spacing them widely enough to prevent a chain reaction.
My estimates may be on the conservative side because they don’t include the cost of new transmission that will be needed, or the cost of wind farms and solar panels that the batteries will be backing up. Which is why it’s puzzling that Beacon Hill is not leveling with us about the cost of the clean energy transition. It’s time to start asking the tough questions. Ratepayers deserve answers.
Laurie Belsito is the policy director at Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance.
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