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To make wind and solar power more reliable, you need to stop earth rotation or manipulate the climate to produce continuous sunlight and/or wind. That’s simply

To make wind and solar power more reliable, you need to stop earth rotation or manipulate the climate to produce continuous sunlight and/or wind. That’s simply impossible. The only reliable renewable enery is hydropower and maybe geothermal power.

tuatoru 6y ago
Take some advice from someone who has been there and done that, and suffered for it: - Cure yourself of this tendency to jump to extremes. Your relationships and your career will benefit from pausing and moderating what you say. To the content of your comment: - There is a sizable menu of options to make wind and solar more reliable. Two technologies with nearly a century of history behind them are pumped hydro and CAES (compressed air energy storage). Batteries have been technologically feasible for decades, and are on the cusp of economic feasibility (that is: being cheaper than the alternatives), thanks to the manufacturing learning curve that the OP makes so much of. Better grid interconnections also help a lot and probably have an even more illustrious history than pumped hydro and CAES. Demand management (asking large users, e.g. pulp and paper mills to pause for a while), is also a venerable technique. It is possible to use surplus power to make fuels to burn when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing. This is still in its infancy only because we have never before had periods when electricity had a negative price. These are just the things that sprang to my mind without thinking about it. There are others.
imtringued 6y ago
This reminds me of a comment about Creality's belted 3D printer not being able to violate the laws of physics and then someone added rollers so long prints don't fall of the bed... Seemingly complicated problems don't necessarily require complicated solutions. You can do three easy things. Create bigger electricity grids with more decentralized generation (the whole earth receives a roughly constant amount of energy from the sun), overproduce energy or build some storage.

tuatoru 6y ago

Take some advice from someone who has been there and done that, and suffered for it: - Cure yourself of this tendency to jump to extremes. Your relationships and your career will benefit from pausing and moderating what you say. To the content of your comment: - There is a sizable menu of options to make wind and solar more reliable. Two technologies with nearly a century of history behind them are pumped hydro and CAES (compressed air energy storage). Batteries have been technologically feasible for decades, and are on the cusp of economic feasibility (that is: being cheaper than the alternatives), thanks to the manufacturing learning curve that the OP makes so much of. Better grid interconnections also help a lot and probably have an even more illustrious history than pumped hydro and CAES. Demand management (asking large users, e.g. pulp and paper mills to pause for a while), is also a venerable technique. It is possible to use surplus power to make fuels to burn when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing. This is still in its infancy only because we have never before had periods when electricity had a negative price. These are just the things that sprang to my mind without thinking about it. There are others.

imtringued 6y ago

This reminds me of a comment about Creality's belted 3D printer not being able to violate the laws of physics and then someone added rollers so long prints don't fall of the bed... Seemingly complicated problems don't necessarily require complicated solutions. You can do three easy things. Create bigger electricity grids with more decentralized generation (the whole earth receives a roughly constant amount of energy from the sun), overproduce energy or build some storage.