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Denmark gets to use all of Scandinavia as a hydroelectric battery, though. It's a bit of a stretch to suggest that any country could replicate its success witho
by 666lumberjack 7y ago
Denmark gets to use all of Scandinavia as a hydroelectric battery, though. It's a bit of a stretch to suggest that any country could replicate its success without that enormous geographical advantage.
Current renewable technology is very vulnerable to certain kinds of interruption. In the case of a bad storm, for example, wind turbines have to be shut off (as happened in Denmark in 2005) to avoid damage and the sky is likely to be too overcast for significant solar generation, so a country using 100% intermittent renewables faces blackouts unless they've invested trillions of dollars in multiple days of battery capacity (for my country, the UK, 48 hours of battery capacity at current prices works out to be 2.58 trillion USD).
The alternative to battery backup for wind+solar is to have natural gas plants on-site to fill in demand, but even when they're rarely used they leak so much methane that much of the relative CO2 savings from the renewables they're backing are wiped out.
Nuclear (fission) energy has lots of ugly flaws, and if it does rescue us from the climate crisis it won't be in the form of monolithic one-off generating stations, but I think going all on on wind and solar is a huge mistake. (I'd much rather see a carbon-tax based blind incentive structure designed to encourage fair competition between sources than specific subsidies to any specific one, but I'm not sure that's feasible on the timescale we're talking about)
- pjc50 7y ago> even when they're rarely used they leak so much methane that much of the relative CO2 savings from the renewables they're backing are wiped out. This is not true.
- cygx 7y agoYeah, I need a citation for that as well: As far as I'm aware, significant leaks only happen at production sites, but not the plants. Also note that natural gas infrastructure can substiture for 'geographical advantages': Germany can store several hundreds TWh that way, which is more than sufficient. Recent claims of power-to-gas-to-power roundtrip efficiency are at 80%, though I've no idea about associated costs.
- pjc50 7y agoThere's power-to-gas going on at scale? Where?
- cygx 7y agoThere isn't, sorry if I worded that confusingly: If the claimed theoretical efficiences of 80% can be achieved in a way that's economically viable, then the pre-existing German infrastructure solves the storage problem and you could go 100% renewable. If not, it would be more effective to keep some nuclear capabilities around.
- 666lumberjack 7y agohttps://energypost.eu/wind-solars-achilles-heel-methane-meltdown-porter-ranch-means-energy-transition/ https://energypost.eu/wind-solars-achilles-heel-methane-melt... Sources in the article. There's a paper on observed leak rates at different plants too but I'm on my phone and can't find it.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]