Interestingly enough, Tesla just released their "Master Plan 3" which admits the need for hydrogen for seasonal energy storage and synthetic fuels. It doesn't admit the need for nuclear though. So we can see it as a first step to coming to reality, but it is not there yet.
I bring this up because I am constantly annoyed by those who really haven't thought through their green energy dreams, and forget that compromises need to exist. These compromises actually have no serious penalties whatsoever BTW, it just requires a more complexity thinking process.
And in this case, it means that there will be a lot of times where the solution is to build a gas turbine running on hydrogen, ammonia, synthetic fuels, etc., or build a nuclear reactor. Just piling up more and more renewables onto the grid isn't a solution. We are finally seeing some people come to reality on this, and I expect even further shifts to more realistic thinking in the future.
Every back of the envelope calculation of this makes the same basic mistake of acting like every watt is sacred and that spending billions on barely used batteries to save 1 Watt every 5 years makes sense.
It's just silliness disguised with maths. Which is excusable the first 10 or so times its done, but is getting old now.
What's really getting old is claiming renewables are cheap and easy to build while not calculating all the additional requirements that are needed to have a stable power supply such as overbuilding, storage etc.
That is a fair point, but what are you actually advocating for?
Tainting public perception of renewables with cost-related FUD more strongly?
IMO the need for storage and better grid connectivity gets brought up in every discussion about electromobility and renewable power already anyway, so everyone seems well enough aware of it.
I'd also like to point out that glossing over this is SUPER comparable with assuming >80% capacity factors for nuclear plants which the anti-renewable crowd always eagerly does.
> Tainting public perception of renewables with cost-related FUD more strongly?
Or maybe bring actual discussions into public perception, and not just the unquestioned undebatable "renewable everything will solve everything by magic"?
> so everyone seems well enough aware of it.
Of course very few are aware of it.
All the discussion is doe-eyed "we just need to replace everything with renewables". No one talks about the need to overbuild, and how much. Storage is assumed a solved issue even though it's not anywhere near the required scale.
Relative to the alternatives, it does not cost more money. You just need to accept the existence of hydrogen-based energy storage and perhaps synthetic fuels too. Cost will be the same or less as other energy storage ideas. And if you accept nuclear, you don’t even need much energy storage at all.
Also, a big chunk of the “energy storage” solution is utilizing biofuels. Like in Germany where wood burning power plants are seen as green (hint: they’re not). Getting rid of this will be a huge boon. The compromise in question will have significant environmental benefits. It’s unfortunate that so many are blind to their own bad ideas and have not noticed the problems of biofuels.
The compromise is going beyond electrification. You need large scale energy storage or baseload power, plus the needs of industry (aka the hard decarbonization sector). This cannot be solved purely by electrification. People who have thought hard about the problem have realized this. Unfortunately, quite a few people are trapping in an obsession with ideological purity and haven't figured it out. Breaking this obsession has basically no negative consequences, as it simply gives you a real path to zero emissions.
I bring this up because I am constantly annoyed by those who really haven't thought through their green energy dreams, and forget that compromises need to exist. These compromises actually have no serious penalties whatsoever BTW, it just requires a more complexity thinking process.
And in this case, it means that there will be a lot of times where the solution is to build a gas turbine running on hydrogen, ammonia, synthetic fuels, etc., or build a nuclear reactor. Just piling up more and more renewables onto the grid isn't a solution. We are finally seeing some people come to reality on this, and I expect even further shifts to more realistic thinking in the future.