Slashdot Mirror
Is Storage Necessary For Renewable Energy?
mdsolar writes Physicist and energy expert Amory Lovins, chief scientist at The Rocky Mountain Institute, recently released a video in which he claims that renewable energy can meet all of our energy needs without the need for a fossil fuel or nuclear baseload generation. There's nothing unusual about that — many people have made that claim — but he also suggests that this can be done without a lot of grid-level storage. Instead, Lovins describes a "choreography" between supply and demand, using predictive computer models models to anticipate production and consumption, and intelligent routing to deliver power where it's needed. This "energy dance," combined with advances in energy efficiency, will allow us to meet all of our energy needs without sacrificing reliability.
Never worked as an academic physicist, never even completed a degree apparently.
Never worked in the power industry.
Never manufactured EE Equipment.
Nevertheless knows how to power the world?
-- Mike Greaves
Well said. He also forgets that we already have problems with failover and unexpected losses of transmission lines which lead to blackouts.
I mean, one could probably design a system which works as he proposes - however, this would almost certainly mean a complete revamp of the existing electrical grid.
At which point investing in storage technology and facilities will be the cheaper and more reliable solution.
bah. Engineering is about being able to tell somebody that, say, a bridge can be built in X days, bearing Y load of such and such type, endure for Z years at a cost $$$ AND be able to explain that we actually don't have analytical equations for all the physics that relate to it. Engineering is about taking responsibility in delivering the collected knowledge about technical systems of the past, for addressing current and future needs. As an engineer, it is nowhere written that you grasp the whole physics about a technical system, although you are still held accountable for its performance - as a minimum, to explain observed behavior.
It would require smart 'everything'
Not at all. It just requires enough smart equipment to cope with whatever the variation in supply is. Even on an entirely renewable grid there will still be a lot of base load available, from non-intermittent sources like hydro and from the minimum output of variable sources like wind. If you have enough turbines the wind is always blowing somewhere, and the overall output of the entire fleet never drops below some predictable level.
Also note that he isn't say "no storage", just no grid level storage. House pack batteries and EVs, even small local pumped storage will be available.
I'm not saying this is a desirable state of affairs, merely possible. In practice it would make a lot of sense to have grid level storage.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The American Physical Society, http://www.aps.org/units/fps/m... Association of Energy Engineers http://www.aeecenter.org/i4a/p... and the Annual Appalachian Energy Summit http://www.news.appstate.edu/2... all seem happy to have Lovins as a Keynote speaker. Guess claims he is not an expert are ignored by these groups.
And yet spreading cr*p is all you do here. How about a link or two instead of ad hominem all the the time?