> Building 3x renewables in widely distributed places radically reduces volatility.
Is that actually true? Serious question. That sounds like a claim that seems so obvious, but won't hold up to the degree you might think in reality. Just one scenario I'm thinking of are giant storms that have clouds spanning multiple countries. And in that storm scenario even wind power shuts down to prevent damage.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2015.12.318 has tried to analyze this for the EU. I'm not convinced that daily data provides the necessary granularity though, but more detailed data for the mentioned time span probably doesn't exist. I would try to find some more articles and check if there is a consensus.
Is storage really transportable ? Like how much energy in any form could you realistically transport for any meaningful distance without using too much of the energy that you are transporting ? Since you made the claim I'd like you to paint any kind of realistic scenario.
Hydrocarbons, especially medium-chain liquid hydrocarbons, can easily and safely be transported 10_000 kilometres and further.
Doing exactly that is presently about a quarter of total global international trade by value.
Their advantages of high energy density, safety, and undemanding environmental and handling requirements (distribution can be performed in temperatures from -40 to +40 celsius by almost untrained teenagers), and effectively unlimited storage duration and volume, far outweigh the energy inefficiency of producing them from atmospheric carbon. Especially once PV gets cheap enough.
Edit: I notice I didn't answer your question. For liquid hydrocarbons, I believe the answer is in the single digit percents, perhaps five percent. For LNG, the energy cost is much higher, perhaps as much as a third of the total energy value.
TFA is entirely about synthesizing transportable hydrocarbon energy storage.
But making methane is inferior to making ammonia, because extracting the diffuse carbon you need from air takes up energy. It does not displace any more CO2 emission, because somebody will burn it and dump the CO2 back into the atmosphere again.
So, the only reason to make hydrocarbons is for things like your chainsaw or A320 that are not worth replacing immediately.
High voltage DC lines are quite practical over 1000 kilometers and more - Germany already operates an 1.4GW line to Norway, using the Norwegian grid as a storage for electricity.
There will be a very great deal of ammonia synthesis, worldwide, just because ammonia is so useful for so many things, ultimately billions of tons annually. Ammonia is very transportable.
Even liquified hydrogen is about as transportable as LNG, which is shipped all over.
It reduces volatility, it doesn't eliminate it. There will still be days when the sun and wind aren't out in a large enough fraction of places that there will be a shortage. It is less likely, but it will still happen. Factories can't just shut down, people can't just choose not to charge their cars or boil their kettles if there's a shortage.
When generation flags and local storage looks likely to be depleted, utilities will order a shipment of ammonia from any of numerous solar farms in the tropics.
Most of the time a utility will prefer cheaper local generation, local storage, or transmission-line power before spending on shipped-in synthetic fuel.
Is that actually true? Serious question. That sounds like a claim that seems so obvious, but won't hold up to the degree you might think in reality. Just one scenario I'm thinking of are giant storms that have clouds spanning multiple countries. And in that storm scenario even wind power shuts down to prevent damage.