[DemocracyFTW]

> surplus renewable energy

is where you lost me. Hell coal is projected to get burned by the megaton for another half century or so because China and India have those resources and that demand. Mankind does not currently have surplus renewable energy.

[cipheredStones]

There isn't a single global account of electricity generation and expenditures. If your windmills are humming in Montana, and demand for electricity relatively nearby right now is already met, you have surplus energy to either use or store; China doesn't factor into it.

Maybe if you were allocating resources across the world's economies, it would be better to invest in solar panels in Shanghai than capture carbon in Billings, but that's not the actual situation.

[ajuc]

> Mankind does not currently have surplus renewable energy.

On the contrary - we have a lot of surplus renewable energy, and it's a problem [1].

Energy isn't fungible. 1 MWh in Texas at 12:00 on 4th July is not the same as 1MWh in London at 23:30 on 25th December.

Energy consumption vary a lot through the day and year. Energy production of solar and wind vary a lot as well, and these variances aren't correlated with each other.

Most big scale energy grids are created with the assumption that every millisecond energy produced == energy consumed. When this isn't true - frequency in the grid rises or drops. If it drops too much you just have blackouts, if it rises too much - devices blow up AND you have blackouts until you replace the blown up devices.

Even if a grid as a whole has energy deficit - it's often true that one part of the network is producing too much but the power lines between them might not be "thick" enough to transfer all that energy to the part of the grid that has deficit at the moment.

If we moved completely away from fossil fuels towards renewables - to serve energy needs of customers we would need a lot of overcapacity (because you can't count on sun and wind producing at 100% power all the time). Usually the overcapacity for wind is 2x and for solar is 10x compared to traditional sources. Better batteries might change that, but it still won't be 1x. So when there's a very good weather grids with a lot of renewables will by definition produce too much energy.

There's a lot of factors, and in practice even in countries with less than 50% renewable power installed - often they have too much renewable energy. This will only get worse as we replace more energy production with renewables.

Big batteries like the one in Australia are very profitable and solve short-term (sub-hour) balancing, but aren't big enough to shift the solar production peak in the noon to the consumption peak late evening.

So indeed we have a lot of surplus renewable power already that gets wasted every day and causes problems, and it will only get worse.

[1] https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/what-do-we-do-too-much-ren...