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People keep touting the low cost of renewables plus storage, but this is incredibly misleading when most regions (Germany, Denmark, California, etc.) that have
by chelical 5y ago
People keep touting the low cost of renewables plus storage, but this is incredibly misleading when most regions (Germany, Denmark, California, etc.) that have high renewable adoption have some of the most expensive electricity in the world.
Storage (especially at the current rate of growth) is nowhere close to meeting our capacity needs for a 100% renewable grid. We can't store enough energy for a single day of consumption. Keep in mind we would need to store enough energy to handle long periods of low production. We're an order of magnitude away from that. On top of that, the vast majority of global energy storage is not actually provided by batteries, but by pumped-storage hydro (expanding this capacity would run into environmental issues and physical limitations; we don't have enough water in convenient locations).
Battery tech seems way off from providing us the needed capacity. Even Tesla is bottlenecked by battery production. We'd need to see Moore's Law level growth to have enough storage capacity to mitigate climate change, but we're only seeing 30% to 40% growth, which is just not enough given that it's currently less than a fraction of a percent of our total energy storage needs for 100% renewable power.
People are also seriously overestimating the time table needed to build a nuclear power plant. India, China, and Russia have been able to build plants in a few years vs 10 years in the West. If we're not pushing nuclear now, we'll be burning coal and natural gas for the next century.
- kossTKR 5y agoBut your text is just as misleading! Only about 14% of what we pay in Denmark and probably a comparable amount in Germany goes to paying for the actual electricity. The rest is for "Green taxes" that pays for our new green infrastructure, R&D and lots of things that will benefit the transition. So if we just said "we good now", 86% of the cost would disappear, and probably not be much more expensive than US energy, or even cheaper, at least soon!
- retox 5y agoI find it hard to believe that any 'green tax' will be reduced, or at least without a comparative increase somewhere else, once the infrastructure is done.
- kossTKR 5y agoBut the tax isn't is a problem, quite the opposite because it targets non renewable sources and has been decreasing as green energy has been established. Also it works as a magnet for business surprisingly maybe. We have enormous new datacenters from Google, Facebook and Apple being built right at this moment, even though Denmark is tiny. Taxation is extremely important when it comes to transitioning to green energy. As long as the taxation scheme favours green energy - granted that is difficult to define exactly. We've had to same scheme with electric cars giving you about half the price of a conventional car. This is exactly how government should help the green transition, instead of the exact opposite that for many years has been happening in the US with the corporate welfare and grotesque subsidising of heavy industry. Though again this is a contentious issue as Tesla has sucked a lot of green subsidies from the pool. So there definitely is problems to tackle.