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You're never going to have a powermix that's 100% renewables. There will always be a few power plants to pick up the slack if weather conditions are unfavorable
by armada651 6y ago
You're never going to have a powermix that's 100% renewables. There will always be a few power plants to pick up the slack if weather conditions are unfavorable for a long period of time. Should these plants use coal, gas or nuclear?
- afterburner 6y agoYou can overbuild solar and wind to cover all needs, with grid and storage construction (batteries, water or other reservoirs). I'm not advocating shutting down working reactors until their planned end of life, so we already have a built-in phasing out schedule, measured in decades.
- cygx 6y agoYou're never going to have a powermix that's 100% renewables There have been a whole bunch of studies that say you could, in principle. If things like power-to-gas or cryogenic storage panned out, going from 'in principle' to 'in practice' would no longer seem particularly far-fetched to me...
- colinmhayes 6y agoGeothermal.
- jasonwatkinspdx 6y agoThis is mistaken. I'd suggest looking through Lazard's levelized cost of energy and cost of storage slides. A pure renewables + battery approach is becoming economically viable. The main problem that remains is organizing the industry to do it when natural gas is dirt cheap due to fracking. Also, wind + solar is generally a pretty stable mix. We already know how to do continent scale power grids to shift power around local weather. What recently happened in Texas was a result of their conscious decision to go it alone with their own grid, and making insufficient winterization investment in the grid they built.