Thanks for your counter-counterpoints. I’ve added them to my notes.
Re. smart grids: Of course they don’t produce energy themselves. We would need the capacity to produce enough during winter. But they address the problem of supply variability. And the energy grid modelers at my friend’s company have found that they can address it sufficiently.
Supply variability happens on different time-spans. Batteries and smart grid technology allow you to handle 24 hour varability.
Unforunately, if you use mainly renewable energy, a solution that just handles the 24 hour variability while not handling the variability over longer timescales doesn’t bring you far.
You likely need to turn the surplus energy in the summer into hydrogen or methane, store that and then burn it when needed with turbines. Those turbines can then not only handle the variability over a year but also that over shorter timeframes.
Failures of handling electricity variation for an hour gives you an outage of a hour which isn’t a big deal. On the other hand failing in handling inter-month variation and having a few days of power outage is very costly.
Thanks for your counter-counterpoints. I’ve added them to my notes.
Re. smart grids: Of course they don’t produce energy themselves. We would need the capacity to produce enough during winter. But they address the problem of supply variability. And the energy grid modelers at my friend’s company have found that they can address it sufficiently.
Supply variability happens on different time-spans. Batteries and smart grid technology allow you to handle 24 hour varability.
Unforunately, if you use mainly renewable energy, a solution that just handles the 24 hour variability while not handling the variability over longer timescales doesn’t bring you far.
You likely need to turn the surplus energy in the summer into hydrogen or methane, store that and then burn it when needed with turbines. Those turbines can then not only handle the variability over a year but also that over shorter timeframes.
Failures of handling electricity variation for an hour gives you an outage of a hour which isn’t a big deal. On the other hand failing in handling inter-month variation and having a few days of power outage is very costly.
Yeah, 24 h variability is what I meant. Producing hydrogen or methane for longer-term storage sounds interesting.