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Renewables are very cheap if you want to improve your clean energy portion from let us say 11.2% to 12.9%. You don’t have to think about storage and it’s good e
by enaaem 5y ago
Renewables are very cheap if you want to improve your clean energy portion from let us say 11.2% to 12.9%. You don’t have to think about storage and it’s good enough for the next election. But what if we want go full carbon neutral by 2050?
- api 5y agoLooking around the world it seems like it’s easy and cheap today to get to 30% or so solar and wind (averaged over 24-48h). Going beyond that gets a lot harder. You need storage, long range grid connects (e.g. HVDC), etc. The actual practical max varies by location. Some places have a ton of solar or wind and some have poor conditions. There are regions with poor renewables and high population density. That would require long range grid connects but that in turn raises the bar for the regions from which they are drawing. Batteries need to drop in price by at least another order of magnitude. They’ve already experienced almost Moore’s Law price drops for the past two decades so this is probably possible. The major cost now is manufacturing not materials and batteries are amenable to a lot of manufacturing automation.