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Why can we only rely on wind and solar to 70 or 80%? South Australia had more than a week of more than 100% net wind+solar generation without much tranmission o
by sandos 4y ago
Why can we only rely on wind and solar to 70 or 80%? South Australia had more than a week of more than 100% net wind+solar generation without much tranmission or storage or hydro, and they're still building more!
Overbuilding, storage and transmission for sure allows very close to 100% renewable generation. It will not be as _cheap_ as it is today though.
- belorn 4y agoWe could. We really could. We could make a law today that forbids the construction of new fossil fueled plants. We could make a law that said that by 15 years the national grid will not allow the use of fossil fuels to stabilize the grid when demand exceed supply, and that by then people will either have to live with power outage or creating storage that match capacity with demand. What we can observe in the world is an significant and continued increase in fossil fuel capacity, and energy politics being dependent on fossil fuel costs. Even in country with way over 100% wind capacity like Denmark, they still can only consume about 40% from wind. The remaining 60% comes from other sources like imports that are directly linked to fossil fuels. Getting those 60% to be generated from storage would be a major victory.