Nice Headline, Doctor – But That Doesn’t Make It True

By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent

What Happened:Ah, ya gotta love drive-by hit pieces led by tricky, click-bait headlines, don’t you (you don’t, and you SHOULDN’T)?

Vox ran an article (which you no doubt saw, given how many of you clicked on it) that implied somehow battery storage was bad for the electrical grid, headlined “Batteries have a dirty secret.”

Then, in the subhead, David Roberts, aka “Dr. Vox,” asserts that the actual deployment of batteries increases carbon emissions.

OMG, if true, right? Well, as you probably have already guessed, that’s not what the story says at all. Quelle surprise.

SolarWakeup’s View:  There are times when I kinda hate my profession. And articles like that by David Roberts, who implies he’s a doctor on Twitter (and may well be), this morning in Vox are some of those times.

Under a headline “Batteries have a dirty secret,” Roberts implies that somehow, battery storage is bad for the environment. I’m sure he knows better, but he’s hoping you won’t (and there are a lot of average Americans out there who won’t).

Of course, once he’s got you sucked in by the click-bait headline, he can say whatever he wants. And what he wants to tell you is that in a fossil-fuel based electricity-generation system, battery storage can increase carbon emissions because the energy they’re storing is from fossil-fuel based electricity generation.

Oh. Is this really…debatable? Is this…an argument we have to have? Isn’t it a pretty well-accepted maxim that if you put garbage in, you are going to get garbage out? (Yes. Yes it is.)

He bases his entire premise on a study of current battery storage installations, which does find that to an extent – in places where solar and other renewables aren’t prevalent – battery storage stores energy from dirty fuel plants and therefore doesn’t do anything to cut back on fossil fuels and, in some cases, increases them.

But to make the argument that battery storage is dirty (a premise, I should note, Roberts himself debunks in the article with a wink and a nod as if to say, “See what I did there?” Yeah, I see you, David, and I thumb my nose in your general direction), you have to accept another idea: Electricity generation is forever preserved in amber as it is today. In other words, we will never have enough renewables on the grid to change the unvirtuous cycle he describes.

Which is, of course, nonsense at its core.

I’m not going to lie: Toward the end of the article, Roberts makes some good points about how battery-storage policy needs to change and actually offers some useful ideas. Most people, however, won’t read past the headline, subhead and maybe the first three paragraphs. And if they do that in this piece, then they’re going to walk away thinking battery storage is bad for the environment – a false narrative that could hurt the industry in the long run.

More:

Dave Roberts Lies About A Thing To Get You To Click On A Story (But I’m Not Going To Enable Him)