Comment by johanyc
18 hours ago
The core issue with renewables is reliability. Who cares it's cheap when it doesnt produce energy when I need it
18 hours ago
The core issue with renewables is reliability. Who cares it's cheap when it doesnt produce energy when I need it
No one cares, you buy it temporarily from the one who has it. And next time you may be the one who has it, and he may buy from you.
Do they produce coffee beans in your country? No? Were you ever worried about not having enough coffee?
> Were you ever worried about not having enough coffee?
Yet people are worried about delivery of oil and gas. The consequences of not having sufficient energy are more severe than a headache. I would not trivialise a life without electricity; how many people died in the Iberian Peninsular blackout?
You should check out these things called batteries.
You can't manage a winter load with batteries (and no country on earth does it), batteries would need a 100x improvement for that purpose.
Yes, I looked into it. To store a few days worth of electricity I would need maybe 100kWh of battery storage. Right now I think battery storage costs around $100 per kWh. A whole season of electricity would be prohibitively expensive.
With proper system design this becomes a non-problem. This adds cost, but done properly it's cheaper than a system based on nuclear, especially going forward as renewable and storage costs continue their relentless decline (at a pace nuclear could only dream of).
In more detail: you want two kinds of storage, one optimized for daily charge discharge, and one for long term storage, to handle different frequencies in the power spectrum of the power-demand mismatch curve. The first is batteries, and the second is various techologies (like thermal or hydrogen) that will be brought into play for the last 5% or so of grid decarbonization.
And we do have detailed weather data for the last 70 years in Europe.
So it should be easy for proponents of renewables plus batteries like you to show that their proposed solutions would have worked all those years.
One can do modeling based on weather data, yes. There's even a web site where you can do that and obtain cost optimized designs (under various cost and technology assumptions): https://model.energy/