Solar is great while the sun shines. But, the electrons need to be stored for when the sun doesn’t shine.
Yes, we should continue to install solar, and the needed batteries or other storage methods. But, the future is fusion and geothermal. Geothermal development is making steady progress, in part by piggy backing on the fracking methods developed for oil. I expect geothermal to become widely adopted before fusion is ready. Or, at least it would be if people in power stopped ignoring it. It’s cheaper, and there are no big issues that we can’t see a clear path toward solving with current engineering knowledge.
The german article on the renewable energy transition ( https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energiewende ) discusses this quite well. You don’t need any storage or other measures up to 30% electricity from solar and wind. This means, you just feed into the grid and nothing bad happens. Gas power plants would throttle their output automatically as they already do to match demand.
From 30% to 70% you can do simply with adaptive demand, i.e. making big industrial consumers run when there’s ample cheap electricity and throttle them when there’s not. No storage needed here either.
Seasonal storage is only needed for the last 30% of the renewable energy transition. Methods discussed today include synthetic fuels made from excess renewable energy when it is available. There’s already methods for chemical synthesis discussed in the literature. Let’s worry about it when we get to it.
The problem is geothermal is very limited by location and fusion is still decades away. We need both to contribute but one will always be an insignificant percentage and the other will be too late: we need to get carbon neutral faster than fusion can help us get there
Solar is great while the sun shines. But, the electrons need to be stored for when the sun doesn’t shine.
Yes, we should continue to install solar, and the needed batteries or other storage methods. But, the future is fusion and geothermal. Geothermal development is making steady progress, in part by piggy backing on the fracking methods developed for oil. I expect geothermal to become widely adopted before fusion is ready. Or, at least it would be if people in power stopped ignoring it. It’s cheaper, and there are no big issues that we can’t see a clear path toward solving with current engineering knowledge.
The german article on the renewable energy transition ( https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energiewende ) discusses this quite well. You don’t need any storage or other measures up to 30% electricity from solar and wind. This means, you just feed into the grid and nothing bad happens. Gas power plants would throttle their output automatically as they already do to match demand.
From 30% to 70% you can do simply with adaptive demand, i.e. making big industrial consumers run when there’s ample cheap electricity and throttle them when there’s not. No storage needed here either.
Seasonal storage is only needed for the last 30% of the renewable energy transition. Methods discussed today include synthetic fuels made from excess renewable energy when it is available. There’s already methods for chemical synthesis discussed in the literature. Let’s worry about it when we get to it.
The problem is geothermal is very limited by location and fusion is still decades away. We need both to contribute but one will always be an insignificant percentage and the other will be too late: we need to get carbon neutral faster than fusion can help us get there
when the sun doesn’t shines you are usually supposed to go to sleep
Gosh, I didnt realise I was supposed to be sleeping from 3pm until 9am in winter. Good to know
In Ireland that’s most days… 😉☘️
Is that why the guiness consumption is so high there? I never really thought of it as a sleep aid, but it is pretty drowsiness inducing.
there’s no need to have big industries that require a lot of power in ireland