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The challenge of the storage issue has imho been massively overblown. Years ago it was common to say "renewables can never work, they're too expensive and can
by hannob 7y ago
The challenge of the storage issue has imho been massively overblown.
Years ago it was common to say "renewables can never work, they're too expensive and can at best power something like 4% of the grid". That argument clearly no longer works. Now it's turned to "but storage is too expensive".
I think the reason we haven't seen storage at scale is that we haven't needed it that much. There are very few countries with high enough shares of fluctiating renewables to need storage at scale. The ones that exist can still balance it out by exchanging electricity with their neighbors.
I'm very confident once renewables hit > 50% in a larger number of countries we'll see a development with storage similar to that of solar and wind before: Once there's sufficient demand prices for the tech will go down rapidly.
- _ph_ 7y agoGermany had 46% renewables on average in 2019. Storage becomes only a large concern, if the renewables can achieve more than 100% of the grid load at significant times. Until then, it is more important, that the conventional power plants can be regulated quickly enough - that means gas is much better than coal as complementing renewables.
- usrusr 7y agoThere's a massive chicken/egg problem with storage: without storage nobody will build more renewables than can be routinely absorbed by the grid and without that oversupply there's no economical incentive to build storage. I think it might be best to feign defeat on finding a clever integrated solution and stubbornly make all the building blocks of power-to-gas profitable independently (through regulation, obviously).