3 ms·

You can easily find people that did the math for those cases. Basically we still need to do x10 or more in electricity storage (hard to do when you already bui

You can easily find people that did the math for those cases. Basically we still need to do x10 or more in electricity storage (hard to do when you already built all the reversible damns you can build in your country) in most places by still having the risk of a several day grid cut if we don't have wind and enough sun for a while. In France for example, we don't have space to build reversible damns anymore. Which represent a huge majority of the electricity stored (batteries are only 2%). We can basically store 14h of the country consuption. Handling those "no wind, no sun" cases would need up to weeks of storage. Moving to renewable energy is basically stressing the grid. The Germans can use the other countries to limit the impacts but it doesn't work when everyone is doing it. Except if our society is ok to have multiple times per year global power cuts of several days. I'd also like to stress that CO2 emission are also massively coming from transports and buildings. Focusing massively on electricity generation decarbonation only is I think a nonsense.

skitout 7y ago
Energy can be stored as electricity... or thermally (most of our electricity is used to create heat or cold, that we can cheaply store for days and even months) Reversible damns are for small amount of energy and short term... but most classical damns do store much more energy - that is an energy you can decide to use now, or in two weeks, or sometime in few months. They store energy, just can't store already produced electricity Energy efficiency and demand-response have HUGE potential to reduce energy consumption, and to make energy consumption "programmable" A good mix of different renewable energy (hydro, biomass, onshore wind, off-shore wind, solar) make it impossible to have a "no wind, no sun" case, even if there will be fluctuation in what level of electricity you can produce

skitout 7y ago

Energy can be stored as electricity... or thermally (most of our electricity is used to create heat or cold, that we can cheaply store for days and even months) Reversible damns are for small amount of energy and short term... but most classical damns do store much more energy - that is an energy you can decide to use now, or in two weeks, or sometime in few months. They store energy, just can't store already produced electricity Energy efficiency and demand-response have HUGE potential to reduce energy consumption, and to make energy consumption "programmable" A good mix of different renewable energy (hydro, biomass, onshore wind, off-shore wind, solar) make it impossible to have a "no wind, no sun" case, even if there will be fluctuation in what level of electricity you can produce