[ExI] Wind, solar could provide 99.9% of ALL POWER by 2030

Eugen Leitl eugen at leitl.org
Sat Jan 12 22:23:13 UTC 2013


On Sat, Jan 12, 2013 at 01:54:41PM -0800, spike wrote:

> This is the one of the biggest and most interesting problems from an
> engineering point of view.  As we go into the future, we can see that some
> of the contributors to the energy equation will be those which are peaky and

It has been known for decades that e.g. Germany's grid is old,
and has not been designed to deal with decentral injection of
variable loads. It's an infrastructure problem, and control
problem. Not unsolvable, but needs efforts and money. In absence
of both, the situation will start approaching the current
situation in the US (waaaay more obsolete grid, frequent
brownouts to blackouts, so need for local diesel backup).

> unreliable.  So load leveling will be what enables ground based solar and

When you're at 40% level you can start thinking about storage.
Before, you would want to be able to separate input into grid
when it's in danger to become destabilized. In order to still
make use of that load you could dump it into hydrogen and
natural gas. 

> wind power.  That opens up a whole new world of energy solutions such as
> solar-driven coal to liquids, and coal to fertilizer cycles.  It will be fun

Coal is dead. Nitrogen fixation is about 1% of total energy. As that is methane,
water electrolysis hydrogen from peaking solar and wind will be very
easy to substitute.

> to design plants that can react quickly under fluctuating power.

No need for quickly. 2-3 days (duh, weather forecast) is plenty of forewarning.
Gas turbines ramp up in 2-3 hours.  The problem with peak gas plants is that
they're not cost-effective, because they have to run so rarely! So you will need
subsidies for peak gas turbine plants, and penalties for coal, aka cutting
the (still massive) subsidies for coal.

Of course China and the rest of Asia will compensate for that, but that's
on their moral books. Morality is not relative.



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