| > Take the money we'd spend on that and build more renewables; there's still plenty of places in the world (US included) that are still burning coal. Taking those plants offline is a bigger win than storing excess energy that we get for free (minus a longer payback period on the equipment). > Simply overbuild the hell out of solar and wind. Build it out so that they handle the winter demands How do you propose replacing coal with renewables without storage?
Here in the EU, in winter there is no way to power national grids from PV (with the possible exception of PIGS) and a few landlocked countries can't have enough wind power (also often the wind just does not blow enough even for offshore production). Currently there is a mix of sources including coal, gas, nuclear, hydro, biomass etc.
There is also a strong national bias so even as a small country you can't be completely dependent on other countries for power. > So if you have a lot of solar and wind, you'll want to do those at noon rather than at night. Same for other high energy draw activities. Or we could power night activities with the PV from west, but there is only Morocco/Western Sahara and then the ocean. But people still want to cook food and watch TV in the evening and they will not change that, so we will need short term storage. That's probably not even an big issue though. > Build pumped storage between two artificial basins We do have a few here, here is the biggest one:
https://sk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%8Cierny_V%C3%A1h_(vodn%C3%... it's impressive, but also easy to see the limits: you need suitable geology and geography and without that can't reach sufficient capacity. |