Relying on Renewables Alone Significantly Inflates the Cost of Overhauling Energy (technologyreview.com)

A growing number of US cities and states have proposed or even passed legislation that would require producing all electricity from renewable energy sources like solar and wind within a few decades. That might sound like a great idea. But a growing body of evidence shows it's not. From a report: It increasingly appears that insisting on 100 percent renewable sources -- and disdaining others that don't produce greenhouse gases, such as nuclear power and fossil-fuel plants with carbon-capture technology -- is wastefully expensive and needlessly difficult. In the latest piece of evidence, a study published in Energy & Environmental Science determined that solar and wind energy alone could reliably meet about 80 percent of recent US annual electricity demand, but massive investments in energy storage and transmission would be needed to avoid major blackouts. Pushing to meet 100 percent of demand with these resources would require building a huge number of additional wind and solar farms -- or expanding electricity storage to an extent that would be prohibitively expensive at current prices. Or some of both.

Comments

Re:NEWSFLASH: WATER IS WET

[AmiMoJo]

TFA is nonsense anyway. The actual paper appears to be this one: http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content...

The abstract says:

We analyze 36 years of global, hourly weather data (1980â"2015) to quantify the covariability of solar and wind resources as a function of time and location, over multi-decadal time scales and up to continental length scales. Assuming minimal excess generation, lossless transmission, and no other generation sources, the analysis indicates that wind-heavy or solar-heavy U.S.-scale power generation portfolios could in principle provide â¼80% of recent total annual U.S. electricity demand. However, to reliably meet 100% of total annual electricity demand, seasonal cycles and unpredictable weather events require several weeksâ(TM) worth of energy storage and/or the installation of much more capacity of solar and wind power than is routinely necessary to meet peak demand. To obtain â¼80% reliability, solar-heavy wind/solar generation mixes require sufficient energy storage to overcome the daily solar cycle, whereas wind-heavy wind/solar generation mixes require continental-scale transmission to exploit the geographic diversity of wind. Policy and planning aimed at providing a reliable electricity supply must therefore rigorously consider constraints associated with the geophysical variability of the solar and wind resourceâ"even over continental scales.

Which contradicts what is said in the summary and TFA. In fact it seems like the author of TFA is illiterate and can't understand clear, simple English statements.

Re:Externalized Costs

[werepants]

The model does not include the cost of nuke plants that melt down, even though we know they do that periodically.

Come on, man, this is just blatant FUD. "Periodically" meaning 3 real incidents, EVER. Compare deaths from nuclear to constant deaths from solar (workers falling off roofs), wind (workers falling of turbines), hydroelectric (workers falling off dams, dams failing and wiping out entire towns), natural gas (workers dying in fires), coal (workers dying in fires AND dying in mines AND bystanders dying from lung disease), and you see that nuclear is far and away the safest energy source out there. Three completely separate references for you, all of which concur:
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/...
https://ourworldindata.org/wha...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/j...

There are a few good reasons to be wary of nuclear - frequent schedule/budget overruns being chief among them. There's also a huge cost for facility decommissioning that hasn't really been handled adequately. But safety concerns are outright lies - nuclear energy is literally and provably the safest form of energy that exists. That argument is bad and you should feel bad for making it.