Why Wind And Solar Aren't Enough

[AlleyCat]

Why Wind And Solar Aren't Enough

Both Suffer From An Intermittency Problem. A Plausible Back-Up Source Is
Needed-And There's Only One

When most of us think about renewable energy, we usually mean solar panels and
wind farms. Although hydro or geothermal power make for great carbon-free
renewable power where they exist, for most of the country wind and solar power
are the only real options for renewable energy at scale. Those options seem
pretty good because wind and sunshine are free and abundant, and the equipment
needed to capture their energy is becoming astonishingly cheap.

But, unfortunately, wind and solar have a problem-intermittency. The solar farm
in the picture above produces no power at night and little on cloudy days.
Similarly, wind generators stop producing when the wind quits. On the other
hand, a city, state, or country needs reliable electric power day and night,
all year long, regardless of the weather. That means that for wind and solar to
be a serious part of the power system, there must be some other form of
generation or storage that can step in and seamlessly fill the power gap when
the renewables stop producing.

In most installations to date, intermittency has not been much of a problem.
Because renewables are still a small part of the energy mix, it has been easy
to fill the power gap from the grid. But using the grid makes for dirty
emissions. Most grid power is generated by the only reliable sources available-
usually coal or natural gas. So whereas we'd like to believe that building wind
and solar farms will allow us to close dirty power plants, it's not so. Those
old fossil-fueled plants have to be kept online to power the grid at night, or
whenever clouds cover the sun, or the wind quits. And because sun and wind
outages can last for a week or longer, those old power plants actually need to
run most of the time.

Two real-life examples underscore the challenge. Germany has spent some $400
billion on its renewable program, yet carbon emissions have remained stubbornly
high. Here at home, California made a heavy investment in renewables to replace
coal and nuclear, yet the state's power-sector emissions have remained
essentially flat. The culprits, of course, are the carbon emissions from the
power plants needed to backup the renewables and fill the gap.

Clearly it is time to shift our attention. While we've done a great job
improving the technology for capturing energy from the wind and sun, we haven't
done nearly as well addressing the power-gap. As Germany and California show,
unless we can deploy carbon-free, gap-filling power, simply adding more
renewables will not produce a significant reduction in carbon.

Could the gap be filled with batteries? Why not charge batteries on sunny and
windy days and use them to fill the power gap? It certainly sounds like a
solution-until the problems of scale are examined.

To understand scale and how big batteries would need to be, let's first take a
look at the size of the backup needed to make solar panels reliable 24/7. As
every sunbather knows, even on the best days there are only about four hours in
the middle of the day when sunshine is strong. Before and after midday, the sun
is progressively weaker. Then there is the problem of nights and cloudy days.
So perhaps unsurprisingly, even our best solar farms produce significant power
only about 25 percent of the time. The rest of the time they produce little or
no power. That means a city or economy dependent on solar farms will need to
run off its batteries (or other power source) about 75 percent of the time!

Wind is a bit better. Windy Denmark has built so many offshore wind farms that
on many days in 2018, the wind supplied more than 100 percent of Denmark's
power. Yet for the full year, wind supplied less than 50 percent. The rest of
the time, Denmark filled the gap mostly by buying power from other countries.
So an economy dependent on wind farms, even in the windiest locations, will
almost surely need to use backup power more than half the time. For both solar
and wind, it takes a lot of backup power.

T

he question, then, is just how big a battery (or batteries) would it take to be
the backup?

For the answer, consider a specific case for just part of one state. A while
ago, well-intentioned activists pushed to close Arizona's Palo Verde nuclear
plant and replace it with solar panels. The plant supplies a third of Arizona's
power and generates about 4 gigawatts (4GW) of 24/7 power. Had the activists
been successful and actually replaced Palo Verde with solar panels and
batteries, how much battery storage would they have needed? Since even Arizona
can have a full week of cloudy days, those batteries would have to hold enough
electrons to supply power for a week-some 670 GW hours of battery capacity
(4GWx24x7).

Well, 670 GW hours is huge! As a point of comparison, the total battery storage
expected to be in place in the United States at the end of 2019-utilities and
homes-will be about 3 GW.? In other words, just filling the night and cloudy-
day power-gap left by substituting solar panels for Palo Verde would require
over 200 times more storage than all the batteries in the United States! And
what about the largest battery in the world, that giant $66 million Tesla 129
MW battery in Australia It would take over five thousand of them! But even if
all that battery power were somehow possible, it would replace only one power
plant that supplies only one third of one state. So although great strides are
being made in battery technology and costs, not even a technological miracle
could give us the gigantic amount of battery storage necessary to fill the
power-gap at scale. Simply put, the laws of physics and scale say that
batteries cannot be the answer.

What, then, are the other realistic possibilities for carbon-free backup? One
possibility is to continue to use gas or coal plants but capture and dispose of
the plant's carbon. It's a great idea but, unfortunately, carbon capture (CC)
is not yet ready for prime time and may not be for decades. As of this writing,
all the present and prospective CC technologies are very energy intensive and
expensive. The entire field needs much more research and attention. Similarly,
all the other methods of supplying backup, such as various forms of hydrogen,
are also very energy intensive and expensive. In fact, every known potential
solution to the backup problem requires tremendous additional energy-except
one. And that one is nuclear energy.

But wait. Rather than using something as contentious as nuclear, what about
accepting some carbon emissions and using natural gas as the backup fuel? Solar
and wind backed up with natural gas can be an improvement over 100 percent
coal. And gas plants can easily deliver the baseload power needed for as long
as needed. As an added benefit, perhaps replacing coal with gas can help the
people and communities whose livelihood depends on fossil fuels. While we are
changing our economy to mitigate climate change, we must not leave those people
behind. Using gas as a "bridge" until we can deploy carbon-free solutions might
give us time to include them in the carbon-free economy of the future.

But burning natural gas still emits way too much carbon. And even worse, in
addition to its CO2 emissions, natural gas is methane, and methane is 100 times
worse for climate change than CO2. It's almost impossible to avoid leakage and
scientists say that if just 2 percent of the gas leaks, the climate effect of
using gas is worse than if we just kept burning coal. So even under the best
conditions, gas won't get us anywhere near the greenhouse gas reductions we
need. Therefore, gas can't be a permanent solution-or any solution for long.

Which brings us back to the only possibility left - nuclear. Even if we don't
love it, nuclear is the only carbon-free generating source that can provide
reliable backup power at the scale required. It is also the only carbon-free
source we know of that can supply-at scale-the massive amounts of additional
energy and heat needed for other carbon-mitigating technologies.

However, as we all know, the mere mention of nuclear brings up immediate
objections, usually centered on safety, cost, and waste. Let's very briefly
look at each in turn.

Safety. The three notable accidents, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and
Fukushima were rare exceptions to the safety record of more than a thousand
reactors (on ships and land) that have been operating safely for as long as 60
years. No other power or chemical plants come even close to that safety record.
Of the three accidents, only one-Chernobyl-resulted in any radiation-caused
death or injury. And stories about sterilized land? Again, only around
Chernobyl. But Chernobyl was not a typical or "normal" reactor. The Chernobyl
reactor was a freak. It was terribly designed, lacked a containment structure,
lacked essential safety features, and was incompetently built and operated by
the Soviet Union. It was nothing like a modern Generation II or Gen III water-
cooled reactor.

Cost. In recent years, plants built in the West have been astronomically
expensive. It was not always so. Almost all of the 98 or so nuclear plants
operating in the United States today were built before the mid-1970s when
utilities chose them for economic reasons-they actually cost less than
equivalent coal or oil plants! But after Three Mile Island, anti-nuclear forces
successfully lobbied for massive up-regulation which effectively stopped
nuclear by making costs in the United States and the Western world prohibitive.
By contrast, the Koreans today build safe, American-designed Gen III nuclear
plants for half the cost of a new coal plant-and in less than five years. With
more build experience, expertise, and some common sense, America could build
safe reactors with build-times and costs just a fraction of what they have
recently been.

Waste. Fears of waste have been hugely exaggerated by the media and anti-
nuclear lobby.

[...]

https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/why-wind-and-solar-arent-enough/

=====

June: Soooooo Hot!

Record Cold Europe

Greenland SMB Climbing

Mt Washington's Snowiest June Ever

California's Summer Snow At 13 Feet

Thick Ice Forces Russian Ships To Take The Long Way Round

Record Cold Across Belarus And Latvia

Chill Stretches Perth Power To The Brink

Alerts Issued As Cold Front Smacks Western Australia

Freezing Lows Sweep New Zealand

June Snow In Colorado

'Gold Rush 2.0" Thanks To California's Historic Snowpack

Impressive Greenland SMB Gains

Bone-Chilling Lows Grip Northern India

Extreme Chills Grip Northern Europe

Shimla's Record-Cold Start To June

=====

May: Soooo Hot!

May Down Under: Forecast vs Reality

China's Colder-Than-Average May

Low Temperature Records Continue To Fall Down Under

Australia's Record-Cold May

Australia's Coldest-Ever May Temperatures

Record Cold Continues To Sweep Australia

Record Monthly Cold Sweeps Queensland

Australia Suffers Record Lows And Early Snows

Anomalously-cold temperatures across the entire continent of Arsetralia

Another Cooler-Than-Average Month Down Under

Bone-Chilling Lows Grip Northern India
NOAA: Low Temp Records Outstripping Heat By 2-1
"Unprecedented" Frosts Destroy Northeast Vineyards, Orchards...
Australia Sees Year-Round Snowpatches, As Record Cold Persists
Frosts Sweep Europe
UK's Year Without A Spring
"Pneumonia Front" To Sweep Midwest
Alaska's Fourth Cold Winter In A Row
Record Frosts Sweep The Ukraine And Russia
Winter Arrives Early In New Zealand
Cold Czech Republic
Northern India's Coldest Start To May Since 1987
Mongolia's Brutally Cold Winter Kills Livestock -
Leaves 212,000 People In Need Of Aid
Pakistan's Frigid April
Cold Winter Reduces North Dakota Mule Deer Numbers
Alaska's Very Cold April
Cold And Wet Kenya
Eastern Europe's Freezing April Spills Into May
Historic May Cold On Course For Michigan
Record Cold Sweeps India
Solar Activity Down, Global Temperatures Down
Arctic Sea Ice Up
Six Straight Cold Months For Cheyenne
Nome's "Coldest April In A lifetime"
Cool UK
Record Cool Latvia
Reversed Polarity Sunspot

[Kym Horsell]

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--
World Oil Statistics
The world consumes 35,442,913,090 barrels of oil as of the year 2016,
equivalent to 97,103,871 barrels per day. · Global oil consumption per
capita is 5 barrels ...
Oil Reserves: 1,650,585,140,000
Oil Consumption: 35,442,913,090
Reserves/Consumption: 47 <== years left i.e. 2016+47 == 2063
-- Worldometer

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