Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

by Michael Shellenberger

Musk misrepresented the amount of energy that would need to be stored. His square of solar desert would generate only two-fifths of its annual electricity in the autumn and winter months, but the United States consumes almost 50 percent of its total annual electricity during the colder portion of the year.83 What that means is that roughly 10 percent of yearly demand in the United States, around 400 terawatt-hours, would need to be stored from one half of the year for use in the other in batteries (which would only charge and discharge once per year). At current lithium battery prices, that adds up to $188 trillion.84 That’s an enormous cost, but we can solve that issue by overbuilding his solar farm by 30 percent, so that it takes up an area of eighteen thousand square miles. This would be 80 percent larger than Musk’s original calculation, equivalent to the area of Maryland and Connecticut combined. Doing this, we can get much closer to Musk’s claim that we’d “only” need sixteen terawatt-hours of storage85 at a cost of $7.5 trillion.