Interesting article on making our electrical grid based on renewables and the challenges. There is a chart midway that shows currently fossil fuels 61%, nuclear 19%, and renewables 20%.
The challenges are:
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First of all, renewables have only recently become cost-competitive with fossil fuels for generating electricity. Even then, prices depend on the location, Paul Denholm of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory told CNBC.
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Then there’s the cost of transitioning the current power generation infrastructure, which was built around burning fossil fuels.
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One of the biggest barriers to a 100% renewable grid is the intermittency of many renewable power sources. The wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine — and the windiest and sunniest places are not close to all the country’s major population centers.
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The solution is a combination of batteries to store excess power for times when generation is low, and transmission lines to take the power where it is needed.
Long-duration batteries are under development, but Denholm said a lot of progress can be made simply with utility-scale batteries that store energy for a few hours.
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Transmission lines are another limiting factor.
“We have been able to build a fair amount of wind and solar without adding new transmission, but we’re really kind of running up to the limits, especially for wind, because there’s not a whole lot of transmission located in the places in the country where it’s super windy,”
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Land requirements? Not that big a deal
One commonly cited worry is that going 100% renewable will require massive tracts of land covered with solar panels or wind farms.
But “that is definitively not the challenge,” Moura said.
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Fusion is not going to be a solution anytime soon. Fission is expensive and renewables are cheaper per kilowatt (from what I've read). I didn't think about the intermittency challenge. Hard for me to believe we can have enough batteries to store what we need, when we need it.
A simple, partial solution I would propose is conservation. It's very telling when I walk downtown at night in SEA countries and see that buildings are not lit up on every floor. I wonder what the savings are if every office building, business etc. was to have all the cleaning crew turn off the lights, air etc. to a minimum (and gets turned back on at 7:00am or so)