False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet

by Bjørn Lomborg

The problem with all of these ideas are capacity and cost. If we exclude pumped water storage, all of the other many different solutions in existence today can store just twenty seconds of the world’s electricity consumption. Headlines consistently tell stories of how we will see an amazing increase in storage capacity in just a few years. The International Energy Agency estimates that over the next two decades an extra $300 billion will be spent to increase storage capacity forty-one-fold. Yet, this will still increase the available storage to only eleven minutes of the world’s electricity use. And storage is still expensive. While utility-scale solar panels can produce power when the sun is shining at as low as 3.2¢ per kilowatt-hour, adding adequate storage more than triples the cost to at least 10.2¢ per kilowatt-hour.