Comment by idiotsecant
11 hours ago
This is a 'lawyer-worded' headline. I am an enormous fan of renewables, I am an electrical engineer who designs control systems for renewables exclusively. My career depends on renewables.
Headlines like this do nobody any favors. The problem with renewables is that you cannot run a grid on renewables alone. Many days will have an abundant oversupply, like the day shown. Many days will not. Consumers are not tolerant of brownouts in the west. We need pump storage hydro, we need massive improvements to the transmission system, and we need battery storage plants (in that order).
Its fine to celebrate days of high renewable GW output, but people get out the GW Bush 'mission accomplished' banners a little early. The generation is the cheap and easy part. The rest is expensive and slow and needs way more focus than it's getting if we ever want to make progress in the west (China is already figuring it out)
For those of us outside of Britain (i.e. 98% of us?) the message here isn't "mission accomplished" -- it's "Yes it's possible"
Well, in the sense that it's possible to be eating zero calories in the time between meals. You still need the meals. If you're just looking at brief snapshots, it doesn't tell you much.
It was a widely considered impossible to have more than single digit percentage of renewables even for instantaneous figures. That "limit" has been raised again and again as the world gets more experience with it.
It's great that we've made so much progress that people can say "it's just 90% renewable for 30 mins" but that's a result of decades of hard work.
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Isn't pumped hydro severely limited by geography in many places?
I'm hoping for some other technology apart from pumped hydro or batteries to be used for capturing surplus renewable energy for later use. It's unfortunate that hydrogen seems to be too complex to handle at these scales, it'd be utopian if it wasn't and the excess of renewables could be transformed into hydrogen for use in turbines instead of nat gas...
> Isn't pumped hydro severely limited by geography in many places?
Scotland seems to be a perfect place for pumped storage. I see that UK has 4 pumped storage stations, 2 in Wales, 2 in Scotland. But Scotland being quite far from most of UK's population may not be ideal if we're talking about supporting the whole country with pumped storage. It would be like 600km to the south of England.
HVDC would work quite well for a 600km transmission line, I don't think it needs UHVDC lines for that kind of distance.
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Iron air batteries sound promising
exactly, and they are cheap, right?
Pumped hydro needs a hill to pump up. That's why I said storage and transmission. We are laughably bad at moving power from where it is made (or stored) to where it is used and the worst part is it's not even a problem of science or engineering. We have it all figured out!
It's purely a problem of political will.
The headline is perfectly accurate… I’d say what you’re saying is a kind of whataboutism about stuff everybody knows…
Milestones like the one here are notable and interesting to most people!