By: Laurie Belsito, Policy Director
November 8, 2024
Proposed Battery Law Costs Billions and Does Nothing
The Massachusetts legislature is considering proposed bill S2967 -- "An Act promoting a clean energy grid, advancing equity and protecting ratepayers." The Senate addressed the bill first and it has since been delayed in the House. During the Senate debate, the chairman of the committee that helped draft the bill mentioned, “building out an entirely new electric grid is expensive…real expensive.” He further elaborated “so now you’ve got the electric grid, offshore wind, storage, lots of costs being brought to bare.”
However, no monetary value was ever mentioned. How expensive will this self-imposed transition actually be? We decided to break it down and look at a single measurable part of this bill that mandates the utility purchase of a huge amount of grid scale batteries by 2030, beginning in 2025. These batteries will cost many billions of dollars while they serve no useful purpose. This is explained briefly below.
The amount of batteries is somewhat unclear. The Bill specifies that 5,000 Megawatts (MW) of batteries be bought but this is the discharge capacity, that is how fast the batteries can be emptied. The storage capacity is what counts and that is measured in Megawatt-hours (MWh). Specifying MW 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 bounds the cost somewhat. Most of the batteries are what is called mid-duration which means they can provide full discharge for from four to 10 hours. Almost all grid scale battery systems these days are four hour duration so for simplicity we will start by assuming the whole 5,000 MW buy is four hour batteries.
This gives 20,000 MWh of storage. Battery systems today run around $500,000 per MWh. That gives a total cost of $10,000,000,000 or ten billion dollars which equals roughly 17% of the current state budget. If 10 hour batteries are purchased the cost jumps to $25,000,000,000 or twenty-five billion dollars. The Bill actually calls for a good bit of longer duration batteries as well which makes 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 MWh per hour. In a solar, wind and battery world 20,000 MWh of batteries lasts just three and a half hours on average windless nights. On deadly cold nights this is 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 twenty-five billion dollars 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 MW be purchased by July 31, 2025. That much four hour batteries give 6,000 MWh which should cost around three billion dollars. It could be a lot more with longer duration batteries. Then 1,000 MW more are required by July 2026 and again 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 their claimed attempt to ease the strain will do nothing for the average ratepayer.
There are also serious 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. They can take days to burn themselves out. Each container battery weighs around 80,000 pounds which is about 100 times the weight of an 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.
As this is just a very small portion of the storage we would eventually need to meet our net-zero by 2050 target, we wonder why the actual total costs haven’t been revealed. This also leaves out the costs of transmission, which are comparable to the costs of storage and which we need copious amounts of, and the costs of the windmills and solar panel build outs themselves. It’s time to start asking the tough questions. Ratepayers deserve answers.
Laurie Belsito is the policy director at Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance.