Quote:
Originally Posted by downquark1
They really need to specify an end state for renewables, the grid swings around wildly depending on the weather already. This leads to instability and could cause blackouts like in Spain. They need to lay out when we have "enough" renewables.
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It’s the lack of inertia from big heavy turbines that’s the issue in a grid largely powered by renewables, not the renewables themselves. But you can build stuff in to replicate what was, after all, an accidental benefit of heavy steam turbines and not something that was deliberately built in as such. Asking when we have ‘enough’ renewable generation is the wrong question with regard to sudden loss of generation.
If you wanted an exclusively renewable-powered grid you would need overcapacity in wind and solar generation backed by enormous amounts of storage. There are various ways of storing energy - most hydro schemes in Scotland of any size are pumped storage. You can use battery installations; molten salt technologies are likely to prove useful at scale. You can even use excess power to electrolyse water and store energy as hydrogen, which can then be used to refill fuel cells or added to the public gas supply to reduce the demand for fossil gas.
Even so, the most reliable way to produce base load requirement is likely to be a fleet of small modular nuclear reactors in many more locations - in a way that will take us back to what things looked like in the 1960s with a large number of lower-output Magnox reactors in many more locations, as opposed to the fewer, much larger reactors we have relied on more recently (and which we are finally building again now).