| > Until we have solved the problem of energy storage We have. Pumped hydro and batteries (iron flow is successfully being deployed commercially, but also lithium ion; Li-Ion prices continue to drop 6-12% per year.) > because they both rely upon polluting raw materials for both themselves and their batteries and need backup power, which to this day means gas. No. https://e360.yale.edu/features/three-myths-about-renewable-e... > To pick a much tougher case, the “dark doldrums” of European winters are often claimed to need many months of battery storage for an all-renewable electrical grid. Yet top German and Belgian grid operators find Europe would need only one to two weeks of renewably derived backup fuel, providing just 6 percent of winter output — not a huge challenge. > The bottom line is simple. Electrical grids can deal with much larger fractions of renewable energy at zero or modest cost, and this has been known for quite a while. Some European countries with little or no hydropower already get about half to three-fourths of their electricity from renewables with grid reliability better than in the U.S. It is time to get past the myths. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2012/sep/26/myt... > The essence of the wind sceptics' case is that a scaling up in wind power will have to be "backed up" by massive investment in gas-fired open cycle turbine (OCGT) plants, which are cheap to build but considerably less efficient than the combined cycle gas turbine (CCGT) power plants which deliver the vast majority of the UK's gas-fired electricity supply. > Their arguments are not borne out by current statistics, however. If the sceptics were right, the recent windy conditions would have seen considerable use of less-efficient OCGT as wind input to the grid ramped up and down. In actual fact, during the entire June-September period, OCGTs and equally dirty oil-fired stations produced less than one hundredth of one percent of all UK electricity. In total they operated for a grand total of just nine half hour periods in the first 19 days of the month – and these periods had nothing to do with changing windspeeds. Further references: https://usa.oceana.org/renewable-energy-myth-vs-fact/ https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy05osti/37657.pdf Stick to writing web browsers. |