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Comment by deepsummer

14 hours ago

Countries like UK, Ireland, Germany, Danmark, Netherland, Poland also have dark winters. Solar in winter is only about a fifth of production in summer months.

Iceland has geothermal, which is amazing, but won't help central Europe.

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deepsummer

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ben_w  13 hours ago

Those places also have a huge wind resource in the form of the North Sea, for Ireland whatever the other bits of that submerged continental shelf are called, and for Poland the Baltic: https://globalwindatlas.info/en/

This is important because wind season anti-correlates with PV season.

Plus, it's not like north-south power lines are beyond the wit of mankind. The US western interconnection includes both Canada and Mexico: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NERC-map-en.svg

  • deepsummer  13 hours ago

    Yet there are whole weeks practically without wind in winter. And most climate models estimate that global warming reduces wind further. Storage in the required dimensions is an unsolved problem.

    • ben_w  12 hours ago

      > Yet there are whole weeks practically without wind in winter. And most climate models estimate that global warming reduces wind further.

      Not for the combination of [continent-wide, offshore, the Atlantic coast].

      The Atlantic continental shelf isn't correlated with the Baltic.

      Offshore Dunkelflaute is much shorter than on-shore.

      > Storage in the required dimensions is an unsolved problem.

      Also false. The required quantities even of batteries is comparable to electrification of road transport.

      Also, independently of batteries, hydro plants come in two flavours that people often mix up: generation, and storage. Of these, only generation requires an associated upstream supply and watershed; storage can be done with a hole in the ground, of which there are plenty, and just the currently and soon-to-be closed coal mines in the EU can be converted to around 13 TWh of pumped storage: https://gfzpublic.gfz.de/rest/items/item_5038282_1/component...

      And it's not like we can't dig more holes if we wanted to, we dig holes to get out rocks even though rocks are one of the cheapest things you can buy.

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