Quote:
Originally Posted by Ximian
Plenty of places left to add wind turbines and solar. The overlap of times when there isn't sun shining and wind blowing isn't as significant as you're implying. Plus, having tens of thousands of batteries in each city connected to the local grid in the future could certainly help reduce the need for blackouts.
It's not like we're at the limits of capacity for different sources of electricity. I'm sure you're familiar with - https://www.eia.gov/electricity/mont...?t=epmt_6_07_a |
You sure about that? This is the system load in California yesterday. And it looks worse than this in Winter. (tip, imported energy in this grapy isn't very green either).
https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html
Scroll down to
supply trend and set the date to yesterday.
Then set the date to 6 months ago and you can see what it's like in winter.
You do realize the sun isn't always out, right?
We aren't at the limits everywhere, but we are in many places, and we are only adding "unstable" supply to fill in the gaps. Imagine taking a job that paid less, and your spouse got a new job that only paid on sunny days. You might clear the same income per year, but it wont be stable. You can save your money, but you can't efficiently save watts at this scale. It's also not economical to send California sun watts to North Dakota on a windless North Dakota day, nor north Dakota wind watts to California on a cloudy California day.
The normal reply I hear is "don't worry, they will figure it out". I'm one of those "they's", and I'm saying "good luck with that..."
Get ready for brownouts and rolling blackouts.