5 ms·

You need baseload power. On a dark windless night, when everyone is charging their electric cars, you can't just have brownouts and blackouts. And sure, you ca

You need baseload power. On a dark windless night, when everyone is charging their electric cars, you can't just have brownouts and blackouts. And sure, you can imagine a power grid that's smart enough to handle all of that, but implementation of something like that isn't any faster than the construction of more nuclear power.

adrianN 5y ago
Most countries are pretty far away from the amount of renewables where you start requiring lots of storage. You can easily do 50% renewables for electricity with hardly any storage at all.
- Maximus9000 5y ago
  I agree, but not with the "50%" number. “Without technological breakthroughs in efficient, large scale energy storage, it will be difficult to rely on intermittent renewables for much more than 20-30 percent of our electricity.” Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy - 2010. https://grist.org/article/2010-02-22-energy-secretary-steven-chu-posts-nuclear-rationale-on-facebook/ https://grist.org/article/2010-02-22-energy-secretary-steven...
  - legulere 5y ago
    The how does Denmark manage 60%, and Germany 50%? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewable_electricity_production https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewab...
    - Maximus9000 5y ago
      Technically, from your own numbers... Denmarks intermittent renewables (wind + solar) is 43%. Germany is 34%. Biofuel & Hydro are not intermittent. I don't know, that's pretty impressive. Maybe they have international connectors with other countries? I think Germany buys Nuclear power from France? or maybe they have a super stable kind of wind.
      - legulere 5y ago
        Germany is a net-exporter of electricity to France. Especially in summer when nuclear reactors have to be shut down, because the water temperature in the streams they use already is too high or when the tide is too low, or in winter when the rivers freeze.
    - suster 5y ago
      They export cheap wind-generated power to Norway when the wind is blowing, and import it back for a higher price when it isn't. Norway has a lot of hydro which they used the revenues from North Sea oil to install. (Their geography and population density also helps.)
    - minigab 5y ago
      "This article is a list of countries and territories by electricity generation from renewable sources every year. Note that most countries import and/or export electricity, so the percentage figures do not reflect the percentage of consumption that is renewable based. "
dv_dt 5y ago
Increasingly, nations are analyzing their grid requirements and concluding that 100% renewables is feasible, the baseload concept ends up being a constraining requirement that nuclear plants levy upon the rest of a future grid design.
- infamouscow 5y ago
  Are any of those nations comparable in both population and land mass to the US?
  - dv_dt 5y ago
    As the Texas power outage demonstrated, the US grid is not monolithic. Having more interconnected regional grids actually makes it easier to get individual regions to high renewable percentages while allowing the market to continue to mature lower cost storage. Storage is slightly behind the solar manufacturing S-curve in terms of dropping costs, but once a number of EV supply plants start ramping up, I think that cost optimization will strongly drop storage costs.
  - adrianN 5y ago
    Is there a reason to believe that a solution that works on the scale of a reasonably sized country suddenly stops working on the scale of a tight federation of states or comparable size?
- belorn 5y ago
  Here in Sweden we have a date when nuclear plants will be gone. We got a date for when internal combustion engines will be gone from the roads. We have a plan for when the sum of green exports of energy will exceed that of total consumption of energy. We do not have a date for when fossil fuels will be removed from the energy grid. No date, no plan, no strategy, nothing. What we do have is three distinct plans in order to address the stability problem from renewables. 1: Continuing subsidize fossil fuel plants to operate in ready mode for when demands exceeds that of renewables. Oil for now, natural gas in the future. 2: Expand the ability to buy fossil fueled energy from nearby countries for which we sell our green energy. One can pretend that the import of dirty energy does not exist if the total amount of green export over a year is higher than the import. 3: Future technology that does not exist yet and tend to change from year to year based on what currently sounds like interesting-but-decades-from-being-invested-in tech. This year it is wind to hydrogen in dedicated ocean windfarms with massive pipelines of hydrogen, burned in retrofitted natural gas power plants. It has the upside that more natural gas power plants (and pipelines for natural gas) can be built in the pretense that at some later date we can use that wind produced hydrogen if it ever get built. The result is investments and subsidies goes to mix of renewables and fossil fuels, which is a far cry from 100% renewables.
class4behavior 5y ago
With renewables your base load comes from stored power or potentially trade; that is, connecting Americas to Africa or Asia. As long as you are able to scale your storage, you'll be able to fill it up with solar energy.

adrianN 5y ago

Most countries are pretty far away from the amount of renewables where you start requiring lots of storage. You can easily do 50% renewables for electricity with hardly any storage at all.

Maximus9000 5y ago
I agree, but not with the "50%" number. “Without technological breakthroughs in efficient, large scale energy storage, it will be difficult to rely on intermittent renewables for much more than 20-30 percent of our electricity.” Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy - 2010. https://grist.org/article/2010-02-22-energy-secretary-steven-chu-posts-nuclear-rationale-on-facebook/ https://grist.org/article/2010-02-22-energy-secretary-steven...
- legulere 5y ago
  The how does Denmark manage 60%, and Germany 50%? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewable_electricity_production https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewab...
  - Maximus9000 5y ago
    Technically, from your own numbers... Denmarks intermittent renewables (wind + solar) is 43%. Germany is 34%. Biofuel & Hydro are not intermittent. I don't know, that's pretty impressive. Maybe they have international connectors with other countries? I think Germany buys Nuclear power from France? or maybe they have a super stable kind of wind.
    - legulere 5y ago
      Germany is a net-exporter of electricity to France. Especially in summer when nuclear reactors have to be shut down, because the water temperature in the streams they use already is too high or when the tide is too low, or in winter when the rivers freeze.
  - suster 5y ago
    They export cheap wind-generated power to Norway when the wind is blowing, and import it back for a higher price when it isn't. Norway has a lot of hydro which they used the revenues from North Sea oil to install. (Their geography and population density also helps.)
  - minigab 5y ago
    "This article is a list of countries and territories by electricity generation from renewable sources every year. Note that most countries import and/or export electricity, so the percentage figures do not reflect the percentage of consumption that is renewable based. "

dv_dt 5y ago

Increasingly, nations are analyzing their grid requirements and concluding that 100% renewables is feasible, the baseload concept ends up being a constraining requirement that nuclear plants levy upon the rest of a future grid design.

infamouscow 5y ago
Are any of those nations comparable in both population and land mass to the US?
- dv_dt 5y ago
  As the Texas power outage demonstrated, the US grid is not monolithic. Having more interconnected regional grids actually makes it easier to get individual regions to high renewable percentages while allowing the market to continue to mature lower cost storage. Storage is slightly behind the solar manufacturing S-curve in terms of dropping costs, but once a number of EV supply plants start ramping up, I think that cost optimization will strongly drop storage costs.
- adrianN 5y ago
  Is there a reason to believe that a solution that works on the scale of a reasonably sized country suddenly stops working on the scale of a tight federation of states or comparable size?
belorn 5y ago
Here in Sweden we have a date when nuclear plants will be gone. We got a date for when internal combustion engines will be gone from the roads. We have a plan for when the sum of green exports of energy will exceed that of total consumption of energy. We do not have a date for when fossil fuels will be removed from the energy grid. No date, no plan, no strategy, nothing. What we do have is three distinct plans in order to address the stability problem from renewables. 1: Continuing subsidize fossil fuel plants to operate in ready mode for when demands exceeds that of renewables. Oil for now, natural gas in the future. 2: Expand the ability to buy fossil fueled energy from nearby countries for which we sell our green energy. One can pretend that the import of dirty energy does not exist if the total amount of green export over a year is higher than the import. 3: Future technology that does not exist yet and tend to change from year to year based on what currently sounds like interesting-but-decades-from-being-invested-in tech. This year it is wind to hydrogen in dedicated ocean windfarms with massive pipelines of hydrogen, burned in retrofitted natural gas power plants. It has the upside that more natural gas power plants (and pipelines for natural gas) can be built in the pretense that at some later date we can use that wind produced hydrogen if it ever get built. The result is investments and subsidies goes to mix of renewables and fossil fuels, which is a far cry from 100% renewables.

class4behavior 5y ago

With renewables your base load comes from stored power or potentially trade; that is, connecting Americas to Africa or Asia. As long as you are able to scale your storage, you'll be able to fill it up with solar energy.