From STANFORD UNIVERSITY and the “pie in the sky dreams” department comes this study
Stanford engineers develop a new method of keeping the lights on if the world turns to 100% clean, renewable energy
Researchers propose three separate ways to avoid blackouts if the world transitions all its energy to electricity or direct heat and provides the energy with 100 percent wind, water and sunlight. The solutions reduce energy requirements, health damage and climate damage.
BY TAYLOR KUBOTA
Renewable energy solutions are often hindered by the inconsistencies of power produced by wind, water and sunlight and the continuously fluctuating demand for energy. New research by Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, and Aalborg University in Denmark finds several solutions to making clean, renewable energy reliable enough to power at least 139 countries.
Stanford’s Mark Z. Jacobson says a new study shows that it is possible to transition the entire world to 100 percent clean, renewable energy with a stable electric grid at low cost. (Image credit: Getty Images)
In their paper, published as a manuscript this week in Renewable Energy, the researchers propose three different methods of providing consistent power among all energy sectors – transportation; heating and cooling; industry; and agriculture, forestry and fishing – in 20 world regions encompassing 139 countries after all sectors have been converted to 100 percent clean, renewable energy. Jacobson and colleagues previously developed roadmaps for transitioning 139 countries to 100 percent clean, renewable energy by 2050 with 80 percent of that transition completed by 2030. The present study examines ways to keep the grid stable with these roadmaps.
“Based on these results, I can more confidently state that there is no technical or economic barrier to transitioning the entire world to 100 percent clean, renewable energy with a stable electric grid at low cost,” said Jacobson, who is also a senior fellow at the Stanford Precourt Institute for Energy and the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. “This solution would go a long way toward eliminating global warming and the 4 million to 7 million air pollution–related deaths that occur worldwide each year, while also providing energy security.”
The paper builds on a previous 2015 study by Jacobson and colleagues that examined the ability of the grid to stay stable in the 48 contiguous United States. That study only included one scenario for how to achieve the goals. Some criticized that paper for relying too heavily on adding turbines to existing hydroelectric dams – which the group suggested in order to increase peak electricity production without changing the number or size of the dams. The previous paper was also criticized for relying too much on storing excess energy in water, ice and underground rocks. The solutions in the current paper address these criticisms by suggesting several different solutions for stabilizing energy produced with 100 percent clean, renewable sources, including solutions with no added hydropower turbines and no storage in water, ice or rocks.
“Our main result is that there are multiple solutions to the problem,” said Jacobson. “This is important because the greatest barrier to the large-scale implementation of clean renewable energy is people’s perception that it’s too hard to keep the lights on with random wind and solar output.”
Supply and demand
At the heart of this study is the need to match energy supplied by wind, water and solar power and storage with what the researchers predict demand to be in 2050. To do this, they grouped 139 countries – for which they created energy roadmaps in a previous study – into 20 regions based on geographic proximity and some geopolitical concerns. Unlike the previous 139-country study, which matched energy supply with annual-average demand, the present study matches supply and demand in 30-second increments for 5 years (2050-2054) to account for the variability in wind and solar power as well as the variability in demand over hours and seasons.
For the study, the researchers relied on two computational modeling programs. The first program predicted global weather patterns from 2050 to 2054. From this, they further predicted the amount of energy that could be produced from weather-related energy sources like onshore and offshore wind turbines, solar photovoltaics on rooftops and in power plants, concentrated solar power plants and solar thermal plants over time. These types of energy sources are variable and don’t necessarily produce energy when demand is highest.
The group then combined data from the first model with a second model that incorporated energy produced by more stable sources of electricity, like geothermal power plants, tidal and wave devices, and hydroelectric power plants, and of heat, like geothermal reservoirs. The second model also included ways of storing energy when there was excess, such as in electricity, heat, cold and hydrogen storage. Further, the model included predictions of energy demand over time.
With the two models, the group was able to predict both how much energy could be produced through more variable sources of energy, and how well other sources could balance out the fluctuating energy to meet demands.
Avoiding blackouts
Scenarios based on the modeling data avoided blackouts at low cost in all 20 world regions for all five years examined and under three different storage scenarios. One scenario includes heat pumps – which are used in place of combustion-based heaters and coolers – but no hot or cold energy storage; two add no hydropower turbines to existing hydropower dams; and one has no battery storage. The fact that no blackouts occurred under three different scenarios suggests that many possible solutions to grid stability with 100 percent wind, water and solar power are possible, a conclusion that contradicts previous claims that the grid cannot stay stable with such high penetrations of just renewables.
Overall, the researchers found that the cost per unit of energy – including the cost in terms of health, climate and energy – in every scenario was about one quarter what it would be if the world continues on its current energy path. This is largely due to eliminating the health and climate costs of fossil fuels. Also, by reducing water vapor, the wind turbines included in the roadmaps would offset about 3 percent of global warming to date.
Although the cost of producing a unit of energy is similar in the roadmap scenarios and the non-intervention scenario, the researchers found that the roadmaps roughly cut in half the amount of energy needed in the system. So, consumers would actually pay less. The vast amount of these energy savings come from avoiding the energy needed to mine, transport and refine fossil fuels, converting from combustion to direct electricity, and using heat pumps instead of conventional heaters and air conditioners.
“One of the biggest challenges facing energy systems based entirely on clean, zero-emission wind, water and solar power is to match supply and demand with near-perfect reliability at reasonable cost,” said Mark Delucchi, co-author of the paper and a research scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. “Our work shows that this can be accomplished, in almost all countries of the world, with established technologies.”
Working together
Jacobson and his colleagues said that a remaining challenge of implementing their roadmaps is that they require coordination across political boundaries.
“Ideally, you’d have cooperation in deciding where you’re going to put the wind farms, where you’re going to put the solar panels, where you’re going to put the battery storage,” said Jacobson. “The whole system is most efficient when it is planned ahead of time as opposed to done one piece at a time.”
In light of this geopolitical complication, they are also working on smaller roadmaps to help individual towns, many of which have already committed to achieving 100 percent renewable energy.
Additional co-authors of this paper are Mary A. Cameron of Stanford and Brian V. Mathiesen of Aalborg University in Denmark.
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He’s proposing that transportation will be renewable powered. Hmmm, how do we do that? Ships (well sailing ships worked perfectly well in their day so that’s an easy one) aircraft (hmm, that’s a tricky one though, let’s just make batteries that have 12 times the kWh/kg, that should do it, and maybe we can tax them to the point that everyone will prefer to travel by trains and sailing ships, just like in 1850!), trains (no problem, lots of countries have mostly electrified rail systems), trucks (bigger batteries, autonomous driving so we don’t have to pay drivers while the batteries charge; good, they’re all a bunch of reactionary thugs anyway), buses (they run on fixed routes, so we’ll put overhead wires on the highways, just like urban trolleybuses), and cars (anyone who doesn’t want an EV can get a bicycle. Or a horse). It’s easy when all you have to do is write a program to simulate it all.
Now let’s see how many wind turbines we need. OMG, that’s a VERY big number, they will cover all the land surface and all the continental shelves. Oh well, too bad about the birds and bats, but we never really liked them anyway. Insects? Oh yes. Let’s make all the wind turbines spray DDT out of the tips of the blades, that should take care of the insects that the birds and bats used to eat. Hey, this is fun, we’ve just proved we can save the planet and we haven’t left the comfort of our office! What shall we do this afternoon?
/sarc
Rubber band powered airplanes. Already proven to work. You just need to scale up the ones kids play with. 😛
Solar power and wind power: It is to laugh.
If frogs had wings, they wouldn’t bump their a$$ every time they land.
“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”
Then 7 billion more people. Then 100% clean, renewable energy will work. None of that dirty renewable energy, just the clean stuff.
I would like the authors to pass me the crack pipe ….. cause they are obviously on some serious drugs to make their claim.
“….the greatest barrier to the large-scale implementation of clean renewable energy is people’s perception that it’s too hard to keep the lights on with random wind and solar output.”
Stupid perceptions, putting up barriers.
I wonder what people’s he is talking about? There are a number of places going full on renewables with very little success to show, apart from the hydro blessed like Norway. I think its more like reality getting in the way than perceptions. After decades of talking about this and investing trillions, where are we?
Hmmm … his cost calculations included “health” and “climate” effects. I wonder what it would cost compared to what we pay now without those two items?
A large residential community near me (about 20,000 people) does not have natural gas. Many of the homes thus have heat pumps. (Some have portable electrical heaters and wood-burning fireplaces.) It gets cold here in winter, 20F common, and down to zero occasionally. Many of those home-owners have discovered a heat pump alone will not supply sufficient heat. (A heat pump moves outside heat into the house using similar principals to an AC unit “pumping” in cold. Problem is summer AC may deal with a 20F temperature differential between outside and inside, whereas winter heating commonly deals with 50F temperature differentials.)
Many of those home owners have installed an inside propane heater and an outside propane tank, to be refilled a couple times or more during winter.
Of course if one lives in the San Fran Bay Area, one probably has not experienced limitations for heat pumps. That is often the issue with “theory” — it ignores experience.
For a debunking of Jacobsen’s fantasy go here
https://achemistinlangley.net/2016/01/07/more-on-100-wind-water-and-sunlight-and-the-council-of-canadians-100-clean-economy-by-2050-goal/?wref=tp
Rocks? Energy stored in rocks? How was he planning to get that energy released?
Is he nuts? Oh, never mind. The world he lives in must be very, very strange.
The paper refers to geo-thermal energy — hot rocks.
The issue with this energy source is that rock is a rather good thermal insulator. If one drills only one access hole, heat around the hole is easily removed. But with time one is drawing on heat some distance away, and the rate of heat flowing to the bore hole goes down.
One could drill many access holes, using the energy gained from the rocks to drill the extra holes, but that defeats the purpose.
These guys are “scientists” (I’m being charitable), not engineers. I’m an engineer, and know what kind of problems one encounters in the real world, as opposed to the modeled world. They might as well have just hooked up a random number generator to a database of words related to energy to come up with this “study.”
…They might as well have just hooked up a random number generator to a database of words related to energy to come up with this “study.”…
They probably did…
Looking at this paper I would be very safe placing a bet that less than nine countries of the 139 countries move to 100% renewable s by 2050 .
New Zealand has a large number of hydro electric power stations, a few geothermal power stations and a number of wind farms .We still have the large Huntly power station that was originally built to burn coal and it is in the process of being converted to natural gas .
Consent has been obtained to build a short cycle gas fired power station near Otorohanga in the North Island to handle high demand spikes and when lack of rain reduces power from hydro stations .
I have many times seen the large Te Uku wind farm without a blade turning and there is no sun 50% of the year .
The most annoying thing about the Greens is that they are against energy ,No more hydro dams and some are pushing to demolish dams to let the rivers run free
I cannot see that any country that has little hydro ever producing all their power requirements from renewable s
I once owned a farm that had a hydro dam on a small river run by a small power company and at times of low flow the water built up over night and was released twice a day to generate power for the peak times in the area .
Apres ski at Squaw Valley will apparently feature sipping an aperitif in front of a non-polluting fireplace featuring a crackling fire 4K big screen video monitor as soon as next winter. Very cool — if not so warm.
And windmills won’t be mounted on steel pylons, silly, much less grounded in reinforced concrete. That’s all way too costly in initial energy investment and hardly gets made up later by the real output of the equipment, detracting greatly from all the projected savings from the full systematic conversion of present electric generation/distribution infrastructure, don’t you know. Nor would we be able to come up with that intense energy use for replacement of the original machinery thereafter. So those carved wood spinners will top great spruce Maypoles wound with overlapping colorful ribbons by cavorting children at their dedication ceremonies. Anyway this is my particular dream for justifying my existence with the virtue of saving y’all and I’m stickin’ to it.
“The vast amount of these energy savings come from avoiding the energy needed to mine, transport and refine fossil fuels, converting from combustion to direct electricity…” So the mining needed for the raw materials, manufacturing, transport, etc. of all the replacement technology is now “free?”
spaceman
“Also, by reducing water vapor, the wind turbines included in the roadmaps would offset about 3 percent of global warming to date.”
tsk tsk tsk You all missed the above howler in the abstract. Does the civil engineer not realize that wind is created by pressure differentials around the world? By taking the energy out of wind in 1 place will just create more wind in another place. So how would that ever reduce water vapour? The amount of evaporation will always remain the same. On that note I hope that noone has forgotten what the former director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies( James Hansen) did in 2009. After it was found that with measuring of 20 years of global water vapour data, there was no global increase in water vapour, Hansen shut down that project and since 2009 NASA does not provide water vapour measurements. Dont forget that increased water vapour is a key plank in AGW theory of CO2 upping the temperature which then ups the water vapour through evaporation. If there has been no increase in water vapour then the AGW crowd will fall through their missing plank to the abyss that awaits them. I just hope that there will be a lot of pink slips after this whole fiasco is finished.
Jacobsen is so far out of his mind… it is sad. He is a clear example of Leftist hallucinations.
Alan
“I just hope that there will be a lot of pink slips after this whole fiasco is finished.”
That is a minimum.
Criminal prosecutions?
Fraud.
Demanding money with menaces.
Malfeasance in public office.
And I am not a lawyer, so there are very probably other potential charges – at least for the most egregious offenders.
Pink slips for the hangers-on; sure.
Auto
What does this guy propose to keep atmospheric CO2 levels high to maintain current foodstuff production? Is he going to levy an additional tax devoted to burning hydrocarbons and coal to sustain current CO2 levels?
(I love to use the word “sustain” when it boxes them into a corner, but then again, they might not be concerned with the loss of human life from famine caused by implementing their “renewable” approach.)
http://calgaryherald.com/business/energy/varcoe-opposition-demand-anti-oilsands-advocate-be-fired-from-government-panel
The Alberta NDP government has hired scoundrels and imbeciles as energy advisors.
Cheap, reliable , abundant energy is the lifeblood of society – it IS that simple. Fossil fuels provide about 86% of global primary energy. Renewables provide about 2% despite trillions per year in subsidies, paid by consumers.
Grid-connected green energy, typically wind and solar, is not green and produces little useful energy. The problem is intermittency. The sun does not shine all the time, and the wind does not blow consistently either. The NDP thinks that grid-connected mega-storage (aka the super-battery”) will solve this problem. It probably won’t.
They are hoping for a technological breakthrough at some time in the future, because a practical super-battery for Alberta does not exist at this time.
How can I dumb down this message so Rachel and crew understand? This is the energy equivalent of saying “If frogs had wings, they wouldn’t have to bump around on their butts”.
Mark Z. Jacobson the Ehrlich of energy.
A veritable model of modelling. In this way one could prove that Hell will freeze over (stop the warming!) and pigs will fly.
Sanford University should engage in a demonstration project. The university should go 100% off grid, show the world how it’s done.
I wont hold my breath.
Here’s a little ditty to enlighten Dr. Jacobson.
SUSTAINABLE REALITY
If you like your energy sustainable,
You must first make the climate trainable.
With sun day and night,
And the wind always right…
I think it just might be attainable!
Solar and wind are renewable,
But only on small scales prove doable
They can kill birds and bats
And displace habitats…
True ecologists find that eschew-able.
We would, likely, employ keener vision
Funding hydro and nuclear fission.
(The molten salt kind,
For our peace of mind)
And solar storm-proofed grids of transmission.
Affordable energy, for the third world poor
Will unlock that vital, virtual door
To an affluent life,
A job and a wife
With less children than folks raised before.
So, curtailing overpopulation
Is not about “limiting nations
On what they can do
Which emits CO2”…
It relies on industrialization!
…Although the cost of producing a unit of energy is similar in the roadmap scenarios and the non-intervention scenario, the researchers found that the roadmaps roughly cut in half the amount of energy needed in the system. So, consumers would actually pay less….
I’m interested in the energy coming out of this suspicious model.
It seems as if the modeled fairy-tale ‘renewables’ can only provide half of what we need today anyway (and much less of what we’ll need in 20 years time…). So has he simply claimed that people will be forced to use less energy? Or is this some kind of statistical fiddle?
I don’t quite get it: why are there so many commenters here that consider a 100% renewable energy possibility to be “smoking crack”? It turns out to be a relatively straight forward (if execution-complex) engineering and logistics problem.
In the simplest sense, its all about “making more energy when you can, than you need, and storing it for future use”. In the winter (in California), far more rain falls than we can directly use as electricity thru hydro stations. So, “obvious Man” builds dams. Retain the potential energy, and use it as needed later. Side benefit is agricultural and civilizational water all thru the rest of the year. Or multiple years, if the dams are big enough … to survive droughts.
At older power plants, it was the same deal. We have a couple in the East Bay, old relics of WW2, oil fired power plants to keep the Alameda Navy Base powered, even if Bay Area’s power died. Solution? Big tanks. To store a LOT of crude oil, to survive the repair period if the “Japs” had aerial-bombed the Bay Area’s infrastructure. Storage. It works.
Similarly, in the East Bay, there used to be a HUGE (ridiculously) natural gas storage eyesore-tank that could suck up nearly ¼ billion cubic feet of natural gas. I guess before the JIT (just in time) delivery of natural gas which now exists, natural gas was kind of episodic: available from refineries … as they refined certain crude oils, but not so much with others. Good to store a bunch of it. Our (ancient) TV reception used to vary in unpredictable ways by how full that giant storage tank was. Its gone now.
So just consider the same for PV, and Wind power. There are times – quite capriciously – when the wind blows like the dickens. Other times when its as still as can be. There are times of storms, cloud cover, bad for PV production. Or like this week, when the air quality “sucked” (technical word). There are other times of gloriously blue, clear cloudless, cold air. PV friendly. There are seasons of shortfall, and others of great sun availability (summer).
Statistically one CAN count on “worst case conditions”; maybe not best case, but certainly worst. There are detailed records for at leaf 100 years, for the climate. The weather. The sun-days. And so on.
How dâhmned hard is it then to convert that backward to “required PV and Wind”, to figure a growing demand-base having demographically well-regarded statistics, and in turn to define “renewable roll-out rates” and ultimately sustainable replacement schedules? Not very hard. The harder part is to figure out how to efficiently store the excess electricity when its available, to hold it well and long, cheaply. Then to just “use it up as needed” to backfill the gaps-in-production.
Its NOT that hard. I’m not sure why there are so many naysayers. GoatGuy
Well it is fairly simple to explain really. what If I told you you can collect solar energy at 40% efficiency for one day, or collect solar energy at 0.1% efficiency for a million days. Which will yield more energy?
Oil, gas, and coal were generated using solar energy. In fact they can be thought of as “batteries” storing solar energy from millions of years ago. Naturally, these resources only managed to capture a tiny fraction of the sun’s energy, but on the plus side, they did it over millions of years, creating a relatively dense energy battery. It is stored as chemical energy between carbon and hydrogen atoms. Converting this energy back into usable form is a very inefficient process – at best we might capture 40-60% of what was in the original stored energy – the rest is wasted. But at the end of the day it all works out because, even though we are utilizing a tiny tiny fraction of the suns stored energy, again, it represents millions of years of solar radiation. This is the 0.1% for a million days scenario.
Modern methods of capturing solar radiation are more efficient, but they don’t work over millions of years, they work over seconds and hours. Wind, water, and direct solar radiation can be captured. When we talk about wind and water, we are really talking about mechanisms that take up large fractions of the earths surface. By that I mean, a hydro dam doesn’t generate hydro power, The sun evaporates water over vast areas of ocean, and the drainage basin captures that water. the dam just concentrates, stores, and coverts this energy to a useful form. So the mechanism for hydropower is actually an appreciable percentage of the Earth’s surface.
So, for renewable power to generate significant energy, it must operate on vast scales, because we don’t have the advantage of working over millions of years. So, to generate useful power today we need to capture large percentages of the suns energy, not the tiny fraction represented in fossil fuels.
Fossil fuels are very energy dense. Batteries on the other hand, have a great deal of difficulty storing energy at the same density. Molecular bonds are simply more efficient at storing energy than ionic bonds. It is simply chemistry that dictates batteries will always be less efficient storing energy than fossil fuels. So, of courser, they must be bigger o store the same amount of energy.
So, in summary, renewable energy is able to collect vastly less energy, and store it at much lower efficiency, than fossil fuels. Because of this, renewable energy systems must increase in scale, which greatly increases costs.
“How damned hard is it then to convert that backward to “required PV and Wind”, to figure a growing demand-base having demographically well-regarded statistics, and in turn to define “renewable roll-out rates” and ultimately sustainable replacement schedules? Not very hard. The harder part is to figure out how to efficiently store the excess electricity when its available, to hold it well and long, cheaply. Then to just “use it up as needed” to backfill the gaps-in-production.”
It is all hard. Very hard. That is why we haven’t done it, and many people doubt it can ever be done. Again, we are starting off with some extreme disadvantages – the sun is a weak source of energy, intermittent, we must pay the entropy price for storage and conversion, and our storage methods are limited by the laws of physics. All of this can be overcome, but so far, it is can only be overcome by scale – building it bigger and bigger. But bigger is more expensive. Bigger takes more space.
That is the fundamental problem. Jacobson tries and skirt this problem, and claims vast cost savings in other areas to justify the enormous expense.
Hope that helps you out buddy.
The Dismal Science, I appreciate your taking the time and effort to write up this response. Hoping that maybe you’ll come a’looking for my counter, herein I take on a few of your qualitative assessments, quantitatively.
First, I implore you to scroll up (or “CTRL-find”) my other goatish comment re: the conversion of various forms of energy production to equivalent alternate terms. (I made a typo on PV: it is 6,836,000 ea, 295 watt panels per 1 MTOE).
Second, projecting for a world that presently uses less than 12,000 MTOE per year, but… remains seemingly “stuck” on consuming more at approximately +150 MTOE (r² of 0.96) per year… then consider this: At 11,500 MTOE for all fossil fuels – coal, oil, gas – combined in 2018, we today would need…
50% of 11,500 MTOE as PV = 39,306,000,000 ea, 295 W panels50% of 11,500 MTOE as Wind = 3,623,000 ea., 2 MW turbines
The land area calculations are straight forward. At 18% efficiency (solar → electric) and 40% land-packing (due to latitude), we need for the 39,306,000,000 panels 16,104,000 hectares (39,800,000 acres … 161,104 km²… 62,181 mi²) of land area to produce those 11,500 MTOE of pure electricity. Raw, unbuffered electricity. USELESS when not needed, POINTLESS when not being produced, but needed.
Mind you, this is the world demand for all fossil energy, not just Europe, or the United States, or The West. Its the whole shooting match. I’m sorry my friend, but quantitatively, this exposes some of the hyperbole of your position. Let me recount from your reply:
See, being quantitative, I’ve shown that the vast scales is actually not all that vast. 62,181 mi² is not a big chunk of land. Sounds like it, but it isn’t. Its a rectangle 250 miles on a side, about 7.9% of (NEV + UT + NM + AZ + TX + ID) combined. This is not a vast scale. 7.9%.
Note that it is also the entire planet’s fossil fuel use, laid out (without any real comparative value) on our 6 most arid western states, just as a point. Its not that much. IF WE CONSIDER more local generation (because piping hydrogen around the world is impractical say? Or perhaps for another 5 reasons oft mentioned…), then the US, consuming about 18.5% of all petroleum, coal and gas worldwide (see Wikipedia) as our “share”, only needs to pave 18.5% of 7.9% of its arid states or 1.46% of Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New México, Idaho and arid Texas as PV.
For Just the US energy consumption, “housed” on US dirt, it turns out that we also would need 18.5% of the 3,623,000 ea., 2 megawatt turbines housed here. If the online references are reasonably close to correct, figuring the total footprint of 122 acres/ea., then we would ALSO need 127,700 mi² or 3.4% of the entire US for wind turbines. Or if you prefer, 16.2% of NV, NM, AZ, UT, TX, ID.
Hey… PV/solar needs to be in really sunny, basically near-desert areas to do best. Wind, unsurprisingly, needs to be in selected windy areas. Not any-old ridge-top will do. Therefore, I perceive quantitatively, that while wind is good at delivering power around the 24h/day cycle, its also “not good” in that it takes a pretty large chunk of land area to do right.
I’d therefore change to 75% solar, 25% wind, just to be realistic about the wind footprint. The computations become quantitatively adjusted to … 2.2% of (NV, UT, NM, AZ, TX, ID) for PV and 1.7% of USA for wind.
Again, are these HUGE? No. They’re significant, don’t get me wrong! But not like a solar-panel covered nation, or a huge wind turbine on every last square inch of mountain, farm, dale and glade.
The point… is that when I’m working quantitatively, I simply cannot agree with your “sky is falling” assessment, good sir. I think that the numbers are much more reasonable, and point to a possible future that actually could work out.
As to the feasibility of always maintaining a slight over-production (year-over-year)? Again, I really don’t think its needed to be TOO over-producing. If the hydrogen gas as storage works out, AND since we’ll not be tossing out our hydroelectric dams, our geothermal facilities and even our nuclear power plants, but only displacing most of our fossil fuel consumption (as possible), then it is not needed to go over 90% or so of MTOE renewable energy production. Storage of the billions of cubic meters of hydrogen, and their transportation from points-of-convenient-production to actual use, is then the engineering challenge.
Yours, GoatGuy
Well, the substance of your first post suggested you didn’t understand basic principals – what point are quantitative discussions when you begin with making basic, relevant, and important logic error that most renewable advocates make over and over? It is a little like arguing over the number of angels on the head of a pin.
The main errors I see with most renewable arguments are as follows: 1) Confusing resource size with resource availability and desirability for exploitation 2) Misunderstandings on how the grid actually works, 3) Underestimates on how much energy is actually needed to be generated/stored, and 4) Believing it is a matter of “will” over what energy source we use. That is we are “deciding” not to use renewable power (often for some nefarious reason), rather than not using them because they simply don’t work very well. Let me give you a few things to ponder.
In space there is the cosmic microwave background. Why doesn’t the space station, rather than have solar panels, simply put out a small rectenna and collect energy from this vast, infinite, resource? It would work even when the sun is blocked by the Earth, negating the need for batteries.
How about OTEC? Simple technology exploiting the ability of the ocean to capture heat. Nearly unlimited resource. Why don’t we build those? We’ve known HOW to do it for 100 years now.
Just 35 km below my feet is the mantle of the earth, a nearly unlimited source of energy. Why, I’ll just bet, if we invested enough money, we could figure out how to tap this amazing resource and power the world.
All over the world energy is generated virtually the second it is used. Ever wonder why? I mean generations of electrical engineers have actually considered this a problem. Ideally we would build a smaller generator, and this generator would be running perfectly, at the same speed, all the time. At night the excess power would be stored, and during the day that power would be released. No need for expensive peaker plants. You could save a bundle operating a utility this way – literally hundreds of millions of $. Save a lot of energy as well – the whole system would be much more efficient, since the generators are not spinning up and down to follow load. That ramp up and down significantly reduces efficiency.
I encourage you to think just a bit about those questions, not just the obvious answer, but the secondary and tertiary answers, and WHY those answers are important to every other renewable power question.
The rest of your post – well, it is a hodge podge of the same errors over and over. Size of the resource doesn’t matter. Powering the earth will take only 62,000 square miles of solar panels? Is THAT all? So? Does that actually mean anything? Powering the space station with a rectenna will only take a few dozen square miles of it. Powering the Earth with OTEC will take only 3,000 plants, or 3 million plants, of whatever number I conjure out of my backside. Fact is, that statistic is utterly meaningless, and tells me nothing about the problem whatsoever. I will suggest, that perhaps, a solution that takes “only” 62,000 square miles of the Earth’s surface exactly proves my point – renewable power systems, by definition, must be very large. And large is not cheap.
You have a number of irrelevant points to make at all, all quite “quantitative” but as important as the average distance between an African elephants trunk and tail. It is meaningless blather, and the fact you think it is reverent to the conversation is part of the problem we are having.
Here’s a look at what it would take to provide enough storage just for California:
http://euanmearns.com/how-californias-electricity-sector-can-go-100-renewable/
Almost always, people like this ignore how much land the wind and solar (and power lines to them) he wants will take up. I will bet he still makes the stupid hydro assumption. No one is building hydro anymore except a big one in China but I bet they don’t build any more even there–too damaging to the environment and they take up land for the lake, plus all the good sites are being used already. With 20% renewable or so in Germany, their rates are 3x the US rates and their grid is only barely stable because they can buy electricity from France–nuclear based.
OK, I’m not a scientist BUT. . . I do believe there’s value in ‘common sense’, which suggests to me that these folks are nuts!