The point wasn’t 100% solar, the point is 100% renewables. You’re going to offset it with things like wind, hydro and energy storage that can pick up the slack and complement each other.
I’m surprised we’re not doing more green hydrogen as an energy battery system to balance out the grid.
It seems like that would work quite well, with the only energy loss being the pressurising to liquid hydrogen, but even then you can recover some of that by recovering the heat when it expands again.
Bad idea for cars, but giant canisters sat around near wind farms seems like it would be fine.
It’s not so bad if you take wind & hydro into account. Germany managed over 56% renewables in January (and over 70% in June!) Those are really great numbers.
Now do December/January, those are the hard months for solar.
Mid-winter, there is usually quite some wind. See the graph in the link.
There are challenging moments, though. But storage for weeks, not months, might be robust enough.
ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-is-eus-biggest-power-source-for-the-first-time-ever/
The point wasn’t 100% solar, the point is 100% renewables. You’re going to offset it with things like wind, hydro and energy storage that can pick up the slack and complement each other.
Hydro storage is pretty good paired with solar but you need to have lots of hydro to start with.
I’m surprised we’re not doing more green hydrogen as an energy battery system to balance out the grid.
It seems like that would work quite well, with the only energy loss being the pressurising to liquid hydrogen, but even then you can recover some of that by recovering the heat when it expands again.
Bad idea for cars, but giant canisters sat around near wind farms seems like it would be fine.
One step at a time. But wind will likely always do better than solar in winter.
It’s not so bad if you take wind & hydro into account. Germany managed over 56% renewables in January (and over 70% in June!) Those are really great numbers.
Great stuff, just needs some mass-produced cheap industrial batteries to buffer inter-day variation and some backup to ensure winter.
We’re working on it, climate change is accelerating…