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I'm mostly referring to the section on storage, which is still largely true today. Germany does not have enough mountain areas to build significant hydro storag

I'm mostly referring to the section on storage, which is still largely true today. Germany does not have enough mountain areas to build significant hydro storage, and no other storage technology currently comes close to that in terms of efficiency and scale. We could of course produce hydrogen and burn that again but there the round-trip efficiency is only around 20 % in the best case I think (up to 50 % if we could use the waste heat as well), compared to around 80 % for hydro. Hence we would need to over-provision wind & solar energy production by 400 % to use this form of storage, which is highly unlikely as we will have trouble fulfilling our current ambitious goals for wind and solar, which already require a 500-1000 % increase in construction rates over the next decades. Batteries would be another candidate but again the required amount of energy and the power slew rate are enormous, so storage facilities would be extremely costly and would compete with electric car battery production. I don't have much faith in the idea of storing energy in electric vehicle batteries as most of these cars will be on the road when the energy is needed (7-9 am) and will be mostly plugged in to charge when renewable production is low (during the night). Also I'm not sure if the electricity grid would even allow such a conversion as it's not designed for many small producers arranged in a mesh.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago
The section on storage that literally starts by pointing out that a renewable only or nuclear only plan would both require storage? And then lays out multiple solutions, including 20Kwh of EV battery storage for every person which must have been basically science fiction at the time of writing but now sounds entirely boring and inevitable for reasons entirely separate from power storage. Yeah I'd say that holds up pretty well, but I'm still not seeing the problem it apparently poses for today's world of cheap renewables? We need and want to produce lots of green hydrogen for non-burning purposes. That fits perfectly into the demand response idea he lays out in reasonable detail. So why do you seem to think pumped hydro storage was the only solution he mentioned? Even with his dated view on PV prices, he raises the possibility of importing hydrogen: > "Solar photovoltaics were technically feasible for Europe, but I judged them too expensive. I hope I’m wrong, obviously. It will be wonderful if the cost of photovoltaic power drops in the same way that the cost of computer power has dropped over the last forty years." What a great quote to look back on from a future where his hopes came true.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

The section on storage that literally starts by pointing out that a renewable only or nuclear only plan would both require storage? And then lays out multiple solutions, including 20Kwh of EV battery storage for every person which must have been basically science fiction at the time of writing but now sounds entirely boring and inevitable for reasons entirely separate from power storage. Yeah I'd say that holds up pretty well, but I'm still not seeing the problem it apparently poses for today's world of cheap renewables? We need and want to produce lots of green hydrogen for non-burning purposes. That fits perfectly into the demand response idea he lays out in reasonable detail. So why do you seem to think pumped hydro storage was the only solution he mentioned? Even with his dated view on PV prices, he raises the possibility of importing hydrogen: > "Solar photovoltaics were technically feasible for Europe, but I judged them too expensive. I hope I’m wrong, obviously. It will be wonderful if the cost of photovoltaic power drops in the same way that the cost of computer power has dropped over the last forty years." What a great quote to look back on from a future where his hopes came true.