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No. Clearly you only need a small proportion of grid power in storage to cope with peaks. There are also multiple ways to smooth load - overcapacity, battery
by grey-area 6y ago
No.
Clearly you only need a small proportion of grid power in storage to cope with peaks.
There are also multiple ways to smooth load - overcapacity, battery storage, pumped storage, load shedding, pricing. These are solved problems which just need a bit more work and investment, and many countries already use pumped storage extensively.
- oblio 6y agoThe only example that I know of is Norway which is kind of the holy grail of hydro, in general: 1. Small population. 2. Pretty tall mountains and sparsely populated mountains (see 1.) 3. Quite high yearly rainfall levels. 4. Very rich country. 5. Country with a very low level of corruption and from what I know, pretty efficient at building new infrastructure. Is there an example of an "average" country having decent levels of pumped hydro storage at a level that's above 0.5% of the country's needs?
- myself248 6y agoOh, just a few oddballs nobody's ever heard of: Switzerland, Austria, Portugal, Japan, Spain, Italy, South Africa, Belgium, Ukraine, South Korea, Poland, France, Australia, Thailand, Germany, UK, India, US, China, Russia. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity#Worldwide_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...
- coryrc 6y agoThat's power, not energy.
- grey-area 6y agoThe UK has had pumped storage since 1963, there are more planned around the world - this is neither exotic nor particularly hard, the only constraint is land, and as I mentioned there are multiple other solutions. Scotland has already entirely met its needs with renewables this year. This can and will be expanded to other nations in time.