Comment by Kon5ole
3 days ago
Short term for self-reliance Finland can use natural gas (won't need much), wind and hydro. Since they are a nation with many friends they can also buy electricity from neighbors.
To solve the variable production from solar and wind, most nations should probably have a safety valve in the form of synthesized fuels. Meaning that during summer when energy is abundant and has to be dumped at negative prices, we use the surplus to synthesize fuels instead.
Synthesizing fuel is inefficient, but since you use surplus energy that doesn't matter.
These are options that are viable right now, but there are also promising developments in batteries that could make them viable for season storage too.
Do you know what the main obstacles are for producing synthetic fuels from surplus renewable electricity production today? It doesn't seem like a lot of companies are doing it at large scale, even while the electricity price difference between summer and winter is large.
I think the main obstacles are the existing players in the energy space. They are huge organisations for the most part and take a long time to change, even if they were motivated to do so. Things have changed rapidly the past few years.
It can also be argued that many of them are not motivated, because they make money from selling electricity from highly valued assets (power plants). If electricity gets permanently cheaper, they stand to lose a lot of money.
There are probably other obstacles as well, but I don't think any of them are insurmountable.
Synthetic fuel production has a very low efficiency, but that does not matter if electricity cost is cheap. So the idea is to overbuild electricity consumption and let them sit idle when electricity is expensive.
But, AFAICT, to overbuild consumption the capital cost is so high that it does not make much economic sense.