The challenge is what to do with peak demand. For the US, for example, the storm and associated cold front last week increased the overall need for electricity by 20%. At the same time, overall power generated by wind across the US dropped significantly.
You need backup capacity somewhere. Long-distance transmission isn't easy and it's expensive. And, not so surprisingly, when you hit the lower end of what wind is doing, it's often near the lower end just about everywhere in your proposed grid. Even now, the higher ends of national wind generation are about five times higher than the lower ends, day to day.
That's why we talk about batteries. Battery "farms" are proposed. I'd invite anyone to look at the cost of those farms and their scope compared to how much needs to be stored if fossil fuel sources are taken off-line. What's being built and what's being proposed are a minuscule percentage of what we'd need.
And that's why some people talk about using car batteries as part of that storage grid. Which means you can't use your car at times, and your battery life drops quite a bit from the added drain-charge cycles.
Here's a quote from Eric Heymann, who is a senior economist at Deutsche Bank and responsible for the energy sector:
Quote:
The impact of the current climate policy on people’s everyday lives is still quite abstract and acceptable for many households. Climate policy comes in the form of higher taxes and fees on energy, which make heating and mobility more expensive. Some countries have set minimum energy efficiency standards for buildings or similar rules in other areas. However, climate policy does not determine our lives. We take key consumption decisions, for example whether we travel at all, how much we travel and which means of transport we use, whether we live in a large house or a small apartment and how we heat our homes, how many electronic devices we have and how intensely we use them or how much meat and exotic fruit we eat. These decisions tend to be made on the basis of our income, not on climate considerations.
If we really want to achieve climate neutrality, we need to change our behaviour in all these areas of life. This is simply because there are no adequate cost-effective technologies yet to allow us to maintain our living standards in a carbon-neutral way. That means that carbon prices will have to rise considerably in order to nudge people to change their behaviour. Another (or perhaps supplementary) option is to tighten regulatory law considerably. I know that “eco-dictatorship” is a nasty word. But we may have to ask ourselves the question whether and to what extent we may be willing to accept some kind of eco-dictatorship (in the form of regulatory law) in order to move towards climate neutrality.
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I assume that when we talk about sacrifices (where we live, smaller houses, less travel, less heat, cell phones, less meat) it's for the general population, not legislators and other well-connected people like Heymann.