Solar photovoltaic and batteries have unaffordable environmental and economic costs

Abstract

The current renewable energy technologies do not permit a better economy and do not permit a better environment. Solar PV and wind energy production suffer from intermittency and unpredictability, and in countries such as Saudi Arabia, where water is scarce, the huge energy storage needed to make a grid wind and solar only may only be covered by batteries. These batteries have an unacceptably high economic and environmental cost to add to the already everything but negligible economic and environmental costs of solar PV and wind. Here we demonstrate as to produce in Saudi Arabia the same energy of a combined cycle gas turbine (CCGT) plant by using solar PV power plants and battery energy storage facilities translates into much larger environmental and economic costs, with also unfavorable energy security and depletion of natural resources. It is therefore important to invest more in research for novel renewable energy technologies including internal storage, such as higher temperature concentrated solar power plants with enhanced thermal energy storage by liquid metals and high efficiency advanced ultra-supercritical steam cycles and supercritical CO2 cycles, that may deliver capacity factor of 100% permitting independence from the resource variability.