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> The wind still blows at night, so you do not need battery storage to provide all the demand during the night. Is it enough wind to meet all the demand at nig
by xienze 4y ago
> The wind still blows at night, so you do not need battery storage to provide all the demand during the night.
Is it enough wind to meet all the demand at night? And what happens when it stops blowing as much as expected for a long period of time[0]? You still need baseline power generation for quite some time to come until those questions that, well, keep getting hand waved away are solved.
0: https://fortune.com/2021/09/16/the-u-k-went-all-in-on-wind-power-never-imaging-it-would-one-day-stop-blowing/amp/ https://fortune.com/2021/09/16/the-u-k-went-all-in-on-wind-p...
- cycomanic 4y agoThere are many studies which showed how much overprovisioning you need to go to 100% renewable with different size grids. None of these are outrageous, but it's also nothing we currently need to think about. We can easily scale up renewable capacity to 70% without significant overprovisioning. So we really just need to build lots more renewables at the moment.
- ncmncm 4y agoIf you don't have renewables for a while, and transmission line availability flags, you import anhydrous ammonia from the tropics. So, you need only minimal over-provisioning and local storage.
- redisman 4y agoBut then you presumably need to build these extra power plants that can use that fuel?
- ncmncm 4y agoWe have combined-cycle turbines already. More will be built wherever they will be needed.
- pfdietz 4y agoA combined cycle powerplant is about 10% of the cost, per unit power output, of a nuclear power plant. So we could completely back up a renewable grid with CC plants and nuclear could still be much more expensive.
- ncmncm 4y agoAnd, steam turbines cost more to keep working than CC turbines. But both are very mature, meaning costs won't change.