Will wind power stoke demand for batteries?
Batteries can store wind power accumulated at night, when people aren't using much electricity.
Wind turbines line the hillside at First Wind's project in Sheffield, Vt. Kahn argues that the rise of wind power will help the battery market as well, since batteries will be needed to store wind power accumulated during off-peak electricity consumption hours.
Toby Talbot/AP
If the wind blows at night but nobody is consuming electricity then, what is the value of wind farms? Batteries are the answer.
Skip to next paragraph
Mathew is an economics professor at UCLA and has written three books: Green Cities (Brookings Institution Press); Heroes and Cowards (Princeton University Press, jointly with Dora L. Costa); and in fall 2010, Climatopolis: How Our Cities Will Thrive in the Hotter World (Basic Books).
Recent posts
Such batteries create a storage technology that breaks the link between when power is produced and when it is consumed. this article highlights the point that the price of electricity varies sharply during a day. A wise arbitrage move is to "produce low" and "sell high".
While batteries are expensive, their price is likely to fall with experience and scale of production. Increased wind farm installation will increase the demand for batteries, this will help the electric vehicle industry as improvements in battery technology take place to serve wind farms. In this sense, these different "green technology industries are all interconnected.
The Christian Science Monitor has assembled a diverse group of the best economy-related bloggers out there. Our guest bloggers are not employed or directed by the Monitor and the views expressed are the bloggers' own, as is responsibility for the content of their blogs. To contact us about a blogger, click here. To add or view a comment on a guest blog, please go to the blogger's own site by clicking on greeneconomics.blogspot.com.
Follow Us