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You can have a big part of your energy generation come from renewables easily (as you pointed out). The hard/impossible part is making renewables the main or on
by evilos 6y ago
You can have a big part of your energy generation come from renewables easily (as you pointed out). The hard/impossible part is making renewables the main or only source of power.
That requires an insane amount of energy storage capacity, or an amazing electric grid or some combination of these. The US uses 11 Terawatt hours of electric energy every day. Studies project that 80% renewable generation would require 12 hours of battery storage, so 5.5 TWHrs of battery storage. 100% renewable energy needs 3 weeks of storage. Current global production of battery capacity is 300 GWHrs per year. Production is expected to quadruple in 10 years. By these numbers producing enough batteries for the world is not feasible. Also consider that these batteries will need to be recycled and this is a pretty dirty process (currently).
Personally, I think the best plan for now is a mix of base load nuclear power(maybe like 20 to 30% of peak demand) and the rest being solar/wind. In the US we'd need to build out thousands of miles of HVDC transmission lines and build lots of battery banks.