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 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.