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Nice graphic, but not very accurate. 1. Most of the mentioned energy sources are not provide stable baseline (e.g. solar, wind). We will need significant amoun
by jakozaur 10y ago
Nice graphic, but not very accurate.
1. Most of the mentioned energy sources are not provide stable baseline (e.g. solar, wind). We will need significant amount of storage which is omitted.
2. Some sources doesn't exist yet at any significant scale (wave devices, tidal turbine). It may be just more economical to have more solar or wind thanks to scale effect.
- Animats 10y agoThere are only about ten good locations for tidal power in the world. #1 is the Bay of Fundy, and it's not near anything that could use the power. Also, effective tidal power means building big dams, which raises big environmental objections.
- manicdee 10y agoOne of the interesting things about wind and solar is that they can output less than the potential production at will. So if you have a regular peak demand of 10GW, you provision for 12Gw of predicted continuous production, then simply turn off the portion of production that is not required. This is not possible with steam or gas turbines because they have a huge lead and lag time to cope with while wind and solar are for all intents and purposes instantly switchable. No storage required. One use for storage storage is when 1kWh of storage becomes cheaper than an extra kW of production required to meet that 1hr peak. Since wind power is around 7¢/kWh at the moment, there is not much chance of this happening any time soon. A more likely use for storage is to remove dependency on fragile interconnects. Remote towns can use batteries today to help insulate the residents from temorary loss of power due to ice, wind, fire, etc damaging transmission lines and equipment.
- jakozaur 10y agoGas turbines can start quickly and they are frequently used as peaking power plants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaking_power_plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaking_power_plant