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Solar and wind are intermittent sources of energy and Nat Gas, Coal or even Nuclear are needed to back solar/wind when they don't work, which is 70-80% of the t
by Findeton 4y ago
Solar and wind are intermittent sources of energy and Nat Gas, Coal or even Nuclear are needed to back solar/wind when they don't work, which is 70-80% of the time!
You can see here (wind energy generation is the red one) how crazy it would be to think wind could replace gas/nuclear energy. And this is not a single wind tower but for the whole Ontario province.
https://i.imgur.com/XvOAF17.jpg https://i.imgur.com/XvOAF17.jpg
- mrtksn 4y agoNotice how the animal and plant life on earth continues at night even if they don't use Nat Gas, Coal or Nuclear.
- Findeton 4y agoBecause they store energy as fat. Electric systems can't do that.
- mrtksn 4y agoIn other words, they store the energy chemically. Interesting, maybe it is a clue how to make electric systems store energy when the sun isn't shining.
- Findeton 4y agoIt's just not scalable yet. That's the truth of the matter.
- mrtksn 4y ago> yet There you go.
- Findeton 4y agoCorrect but that means that no, we can't go all renewable right now. It actually means that when you add renewable, you're still about 70-80% dependent on natural gas (or coal) because of the very intermittent nature of solar/wind energy. And hydroelectric energy is (mostly, as some ecologist will protest) great but not scalable.
- bryanlarsen 4y agoNot yet, but we're pretty close. We need about 300TWh of energy storage to decarbonize the grid, and about 300TWh to convert all transportation to EV. We currently produce about 1TWh per year of batteries, and that capacity is doubling every 14 months or so.
- Schroedingersat 4y agoIf only there were some source of dispatchable energy with a total annual limit in ontario and quebec, or some way of averaging the power from different renewable sources in different neighboring place.