New Energy Weekly – The New Climate

Matt Traverso authored a great essay about electricity in The New Climate

I read the reprint in Medium (you can click the link to read it too). He does a decent job of laying out the basics of the power grid. He looks at the supply/demand curve, sources of supply (baseload, intermittent, and dispatchable).

What he’s showing is that without “dispatchable” power, which is extra capacity we can turn on when needed, we can’t meet demand. And dispatchable power is the most difficult electricity to make with clean sources like solar, wind, and hydro. Right now, most of that energy comes from natural gas and diesel fuel.

That’s the opportunity that batteries have, in the grid of the future. We absolutely must get battery tech up and running. According to Traverso, energy storage is a necessary ingredient to a stable grid that relies on clean energy.

This idea is the crux of why we created Mangrove Investor in the first place. Because we saw what he’s pointing out now (not to brag, but this was obvious to us a few years ago).

In his essay, Traverso tries to solve the problem using hydro. And he succeeded:

We met 99.6% of our electricity needs and all we had to do was turn off the Columbia River and drown Coeur d’Alene and dozens of other reservoir communities.

This was definitely tongue in cheek. But it illustrates the point that dispatchable power is critical and difficult to solve. It is a vast multi-billion-dollar market waiting for a viable solution. His solution in the essay isn’t with batteries. He solves it by massively overbuilding wind and solar infrastructure.

That solution still works with our investment strategy. We believe a blended strategy of batteries, solar, wind, nuclear, and natural gas will be the solution.

But it’s a dynamic market that continues to grow. And investors continue to benefit from that growth.

For the Good,

The Mangrove Investor Team