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Comment by boshomi

2 days ago

The apparent volatility of electricity generation from a single wind turbine is negligible, because what counts is the wind and PV output over large areas. Due to regular weather fronts, electricity output from wind and PV in Europe is surprisingly stable; when there is less sunshine, there is more wind. In 2025, for example, the weekly electricity output from wind and solar PV was 14.0 TWh, with no week falling below 10.5 TWh. If more wind power were installed in Eastern Europe, the curves would flatten out even further.

https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=de&...

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boshomi

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leonidasrup  2 days ago

Yes, single wind turbine is negligible, what counts is the wind and PV output over extremely large areas because weather fronts are correlated over hundreds of km. Of course night/day cycle is correlated over whole Europe with few hours shift.

So in 100% renewables Europe scenario, you have build multiples of renewable production in each region.

You build enough renewables in Western Europe to power the whole Europe, you build enough renewables in Central Europe to power the whole Europe and you build enough renewables in Eastern Europe to power the whole Europe and build electric grid to transfer 2/3s of electricity produced in each region into other regions.

Can it be done? Yes, but it will be very expensive.

Many renewable energy modelers often ignore realities and costs of physical electric grid and model whole continent as copper plate which can transfer infinite amount of electricity from each to point to any other point.

For more realistic scenarios German government is looking into power-to-gas energy storage systems, where you convert renewable electricity to hydrogen, ammonia or ethanol and store it underground. There are also plans to import large part of these gases/liquids from other countries, so no energy independence in the future.

https://www.bundeswirtschaftsministerium.de/Redaktion/EN/Pre...

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-revise-hydrogen...

  • thelastgallon  2 days ago

    Thats exactly how you build for resiliency. You probably aren't familiar with running workloads on the cloud. There are multiple levels of redundancy, Availability Zones, multiple regions, etc. At least 4X redundancy if you are running anything important.

    The peaker natural gas plants are not running at 100%, they mostly run a few hours for peak production. Any critical infrastructure is built for peak utilization and there will always be some idling.

    The good thing with electricity is excess production can be used to charge cars, pump water, produce green hydrogen or green ammonia. People are creative, they will figure out what to use excess production for.

    • leonidasrup  2 days ago

      "Reliability: Five-nines availability (99.999%, under 6 minutes downtime annually), typically achieved by combining high grid reliability with backup generation."

      https://speed2power.epri.com/demand-characteristics.html

      I wrote software for monitoring and controling electric grids on country level and later software for controling nuclear power plants, I know a little bit about resiliency.

      Physicaly, you can do 3X redundancy in electric generation and electric grid, as there are no physical laws against it, but such large infrastructure is expensive and you have to pay the CAPEX even if the infrastructure is almost never utilized. Also transporting electricity over large distances is really expensive, therefor only relative small amount of electricity can be transport in europe and future targets are modest.

      "The EU has set an interconnection target of at least 15% by 2030 to encourage EU countries to interconnect their installed electricity production capacity. This means that each country should have electricity infrastructure in place that would allow it to import, from its neighbouring EU countries, an equivalent of at least 15% of the electricity production capacity on its territory."

      https://energy.ec.europa.eu/topics/infrastructure/electricit...

      https://pubs.rsc.org/ee/article-abstract/11/3/469/565531/Rel...

      Someone has to pay for this, either customers or tax payers (through goverment subsidies) and Europe already has high electricity prices (when compared with China and US).

      "The energy sector is one of the largest and most important sectors of the world economy. Accounting for 8%–10% of world GDP, it is second only to health care in size and is equally pervasive in scope"

      https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/energy-...

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