Comment by codexb
8 hours ago
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.
8 hours ago
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.
You are conflating ideas here and it's getting muddled up. Literally nobody ever said that we couldn't handle 100% renewables for brief periods. The single digit percentage you're referring to is not about the renewables, it's about when the renewables aren't there. Its about maintaining grid stability when you don't have dispatchable sources to do it with. Essentially what we've built is a system where the renewables provide a tertiary function- providing power when they want to, but not in a reliable way, so we still have the same carbon based dispatchable resources.
This is not a serious system. We've done a bit of work on th cheap, easy part. Installing some solar panels is easy and costs almost nothing. The storage and transmission of power is 90% of the actual work!
It is literally written into regulations in many places that renewables aren't allowed to go above certain percentages even for short periods e.g in Ireland they are raising the cap by 5% every so often with an aim to get to 95% by 2035, it's currently 75% and was 50% when they brought in that particular rule.
In Australia they keep reducing the number of synchronous generators that are required to be connected as they gain more experience.
Renewables started as fringe tech and are now a trillion dollar industry. But they faced skepticsims at every stage along the way.