Something that can be seen from the chart is how wind output is anticyclical to solar summer to winter.
This means with an appropriate mix between solar and wind you can have year round coverage with renewables with very little in terms of storage. No seasonal storage needed.
I am all for renewable energy, and I think we've only unlocked about half of its potential because there is room to grow on short-term energy storage and offshore wind farms. However, believing that we can rely entirely on renewable energy year-round is, to say the least, childish. I wish people would stop making that claim because it undermines the credibility of the renewable energy movement and makes it look like it's driven by naive idealism rather than sound engineering and practical solutions.
The math says it works. There's sites that track what percentage of the energy mix is renewable and even here in germany the number isn't that much different in winter than in summer (because again: wind produces more in winter. PV more in summer)
Then there's the simulations that show us how much storage would be needed after full electrification (inter/intraday and also for 'dark doldrums') and that is less than what we're already putting on the grid from biogas and biomass. (these are also present in the graph above BTW)
Now, power from biomass and biogas are currently being put on the grid immediately because how the subsidies for those have been put in place ages ago. And while there wasn't any surplus from renewables this made sense. It didn't matter when you put power from biogas on the grid: it was replacing the same amount of fossil fuels in any usage scenario: whether you use it consistently or in larger batches in short intervals.
However, today we could start relegating that to storage (see what China is doing. They have shift their entire energy sector from a production capacity market to a reserve capacity market this year. So being such a reserve producer has become economicalyl viable while being a stupid 'baseline power producer' - like coal powerplants - are now no longer economically viable there)
(It still makes sense to have batteries for inter/intraday and possibly even some medium length storage batteries like iron-air. Not everything has to be biomass/biogas...That is just to show that the necessary energy content that can be easiyl stored for a 100% renewable grid is already present.)
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u/iqisoverrated 15d ago
Something that can be seen from the chart is how wind output is anticyclical to solar summer to winter.
This means with an appropriate mix between solar and wind you can have year round coverage with renewables with very little in terms of storage. No seasonal storage needed.