Strange your weather's not been warm. I live in Iceland and our summer has been crazy-warm and sunny, like 5C over average most days and almost no rain.
Apparently in your (and his) worlds:
* Global warming predicts that every location on Earth will increase in temperature at roughly the same rate and roughly the same time
* A region cannot have statistically anomalous warmth driven by an external forcing unless *every* region on earth has statistically anomalous warmth driven by an external forcing.
* Marble Bar, Australia = Earth
* Heat wave = high temperatures in absolute numbers, instead of the standard definition, relative to an area's baseline average.
Wow, combining "un-peer-reviewed claims by TV weathermen" with "wikipedia" with "proof by ghost reference" (worst heat wave != most days over 37.8C in a place which already has an average January high of over 41C), whose closest resemblance to saying what he claims it says is a reference to a non-peer-reviewed web page from before the heat waves in question discussed by this paper.
Wow, I'm totally sold now, thanks for linking that!
I don't know about iDeal, but I'm always appalled at how much trouble Americans have with securing their identity. It's not that hard:
Step 1) Have a *public* identifier for you. None of this "if you know the social security number" or "if you know all or part of a credit card number" or such nonsense. Step 2) Have one or more *private* passcodes or other authentication schemes (really, everyone should have those rotating-passcode keychain devices like the banks give out here for use with important stuff). Because the key is public, nobody is dumb enough to use it as a password. Step 3) Have a single national database which stores information about you, with at a minimum, your name, public ID, and address. This is your *official* contact information. Step 4) Any major transactions done using your identity, including changing your contact information, involve you being contacted using your official contact information in the database.
This is basically the system we use here in Iceland, and it works very well. Doesn't help us with foreign firms that don't grasp security, however.
Also, what's up with Americans and writing personal checks? Geez, it's the 21st century here...
It isn't. That's my point. People are building more and more hydro at inxcreasing rates, even despite being limited to areas with existing rivers, which are many orders of magnitude rarer than areas that simply have large altitude differences (which is a huge chunk of the entire planet).
No we don't, we have figures for existing ones that got the best and cheapest sites.
Even if you accept that future will be more expensive - which I don't, as power plants and storage mechanisms generally get cheaper over time (modern dams are much cheaper per unit power than early dams, for example) - it needs to increase in price by an *order of magnitude* to be ruled out. Not going to happen.
1) Hydropower is only a quarter of the world's electricity consumption. That is, roughly 3 quarters of energy-production resources have gone elsewhere. Multiply your figure by four.
2) I don't have a list of 1GW power stations, but Wikipedia has a list of 2GW ones. The breakdown (ones with multiple years are represented as fractions):
Notice something? Yeah, they're (roughly) being built at significantly increased rates, corresponding to the world's increased power demands and the world's dramatically increasing industrial output. In fact, if you extrapolate the rate of plants being built in the 2010s (note: the one that had completion dates in the future, I omitted, since I had no way to know whether there were other completion dates of plants in the future that weren't listed), you'd get over a quarter of them produced this decade. Just the first three years of the 2010s produced as many large hydro plants as all of the 1990s. And its not like those were three freak years - most of the 1990s production was in the latter 1990s, 3 of them in 1999 alone.
Plus, focusing just on large hydro is probably distorting, since one tends to use up large-hydro opportunities first and then move down to smaller hydro.
Third, the whole argument is moot because *we already have cost figures for pumped hydro*, and they're not expensive. Cost is a measure of the amount of economic output something requires to produce, operate, and maintain. Pumped hydro is usually a little over a penny per kilowatt hour. Given that generating that power costs many times more, potentially even over an order of magnitude more, you can see that the cost to produce, operate, and maintain the pumped hydro plant is an order of magnitude less than the cost to produce, operate, and maintain the power plants. Do you think people are going to stop producing the power plants they need because they're "too expensive" or "take up too much resources"?
Seriously? The the area of the entire continent of Europe? Don't think there's room?
If you're talking about the scale of building that, the scale of building *everything* humans do nowadays is immense. For example, cement is just one component of concrete. The world uses 4,600,000,000,000 (4.6 quadrillion) pounds of cement every year. In concrete terms, that's probably around 20,000,000,000,000 pounds. That number should double to 40,000,000,000,000 pounds of concrete by 2030. That's 243,000 Washington Monuments every year.
Where are you getting the concept that the space requirements are absurd? Europe consumes about 3000TWh annually, or about 8.2 TWh per day. To store a 24-hour day's power (enough to have an overwhelming majority of your power come from renewables - handling everything but the rare trans-continental multi-source shortfall), that's about 500 BGs. In an area the size of *Europe*. Why do you think this is a problem? I don't get your objection.
To reiterate the point, since you apparently missed it: the Great Lakes are an example of how even extremely poorly-cited natural bodies of water can have huge power generation potentials. It was not a proposal to "recreate the Great Lakes", which would be idiotic. See the calculations elsewhere in this thread that show that for Germany to store nearly a day's worth of power for everyone (assuming 100m elevation changes, 20m-deep reservoirs, and 80% efficiency), it would take less than a tenth of a percent of the country's land (the US equivalent would be "one Delaware or two Rhode Islands to store all of the US's power). On a diversified, geographically-interlinked grid, that kind of power storage could give you at least 90% of your power from clean renewables.
I know that office carparks in Norway often have electric points for keeping the fossil engines warm in winter. I guess Iceland might well be the same due to the climate?
Nope. Iceland's not actually that cold of a country in the winter; we have a maritime climate. Average January temps are barely below freezing. We basically just don't have a summer. Average mid-July highs are like 16C (although this year it must have been more like 20C or so).
Also, those car-warming plugs in cold climates often have low current fuses/breakers - at least I know they do in some spots in America because people were plugging space heaters into them to keep their cars warm for hours while they were gone.
If you can get an economy where power trends towards free (ok we both know it'll never be free, but geo is really cheap)
At the very least, the plugs at Kringlan are free.
You've got vast areas into the wilderness and plenty of crazy contraptions with big V8 engines climbing cliffs (everyone's got to have fun)
Actually, I think an electric Super Jeep would be pretty awesome:) And while I know some would disagree, I know I'm not the only one who feels this way.
Large percentages of the worlds population use more energy in the cold dark nights of winter when the sun is useless.
Not people in the sort of sunny areas that tend to be the early adopters of solar technology. Their power is primarily in the summer, for air conditioning.
I live in Iceland. We get our heat from geo and our power from a geo/hydro blend.
You need to pump the water to a higher level, so i can't see how a lot of flat areas are any good
And? You think there's not the fraction of a percent of land that isn't flat?
Try crunching the numbers some time on how much power can be stored in the US just from the small difference between Lake Superior and Lake Michigan-Huron. It's pretty starggering, despite them being in the Great Plains.
Land area for pumped storage. As described in my post above, a 95-5 solution should take no more than a couple days buffer, perhaps 60kWh per person. Germany's population is about 82m. Assume an average height difference of 100m, only two-reservoir plants (we'll assume no coastal plants), assuming an average reservoir depth of 20m, and a throughput efficiency of 80%, we get 15,7MJ/m = 4,4kWh/m = 13,8 m^2/person = 1132km^2. Germany is 357021 km^2. The lake requirement is a third of a percent of the size of Germany. Where's the problem? Too many land usage? Go with a 90% solution and cut your storage requirements down to maybe 15kWh per person and your lake area down to less than a tenth of a percent of the land of Germany. That'd be like the US having all of its energy stored by one Delaware or two Rhode Islands.
It has to do with the fact that hydrogen fuel is a stupid idea, and while the concept that it is never really sank in, the effects of it (aka, the lack of nearly any hydrogen vehicles, let alone affordable ones) did. So Iceland has been pushing a bit more toward EVs, although not hard yet. I plug my car in the EV charging station at Kringlan - but that's the only one I know of (I'm sure there are more, but they're not common).
1) Quite true. Nonetheless, the figure is still quite extreme. The *entire day*'s power consumption for *50 days*? I mean, that's ridiculous, especially on an interconnected grid. If the sun's not shining in Germany, it's probably shining in Morrocco. If the wind isn't blowing in Scotland, it's probably blowing in Greece. Etc. And for those rare cases when *all types* of renewables are underperforming at the *same time*, you then fire up fossil peaking to make up that ~5% or so of your total electricity production. In such a scenario you should need no more than a couple days' worth of storage at most.
2) While wind doesn't track consumption requirements, solar generally does pretty well. Inter-seasonal variations are handled by geographic and generation-mix diversity.
3) This list contradicts your "most expensive" price claim. Plus, citing raw price figures is horribly distorting as so much can affect them (especially taxes and subsidies which vary a lot between countries regardless of levels of subsidy for renewables). Look at Ireland, for example - overwhelmingly fossil fuels, tiny renewable segment, yet they pay more than you for power. Or Sweden for an even more ridiculous example - they're 44% hydropower, which is generally cheap, almost no wind or solar, and yet they pay more than you.
4) "Assured production" for a single wind farm is one of the most stupid and meaningless metrics you could possibly come up with. The figures I've seen cited for wind distributed among farms across a couple hundred kilometers is that about a third of it is as reliable as baseload.
5) The concept that the grid can't deal with intermittency is absurd, because *demand* is already intermittent. Having intermittent demand is for all practical purposes the same as intermittent supply. And the same solutions apply - diversity, distribution, storage, and peaking.
For non-silicon based, it's often under 6 months. And actually solar is usually awfully nice as far as renewable impacts on the grid go, as it roughly tracks people's power consumption demands (several times more power used in the day than at night, more power used on hot, sunny days, etc). And with oil power and those sort of shipping costs, they must have been paying many times the US average for electricity. Solar and batteries should be a no-brainer in terms of payoff time.
Besides, while they may be the first to be essentially 100% solar, they're far from the first to go essentially 100% renewable. Here in Iceland we're essentially 100% geo and hydro for our electricity. Yeah, we're only 320,000 people, but we produce 2/3rds as much power as Ireland (which has 15 times our population). A huge amount of electricity per-capita goes to industry (it's so cheap, electricity-intensive industries like aluminum come here). Of the three aluminum smelters in the country, even the smallest uses more power than all the homes and businesses combined. And we're only at something like 20% of our hydro capacity, 25% of our known conventional geo capacity (plus, geo's not been nearly well enough explored, this doesn't count enhanced geothermal, it doesn't count low-temperature geothermal, and it doesn't count geothermal straight from lava**), the largest wind turbine in this super-windy country is only 30kW, and wave and tidal (there are big waves and tides here) are completely untapped.
Note that electricity isn't the only form of energy that people use. Like I'm sure is the case with Tokelau, we import almost all of our fuel (although there's some new biofuels plants going online which should start to change that here). Also, most of our primary energy is heat. Geothermal currently makes up only a quarter of our electricity production, but it's 2/3rds of our primary energy production (most of it being low temperature geo which we've done nothing to produce electricity from - the water comes out of the wells at usually 100-140C and gets blended with cold water down to the 80C distribution temperature - power is so cheap and abundant here that nobody can justify the cost to generate power from low temperature geo). Fossil fuels (mainly oil) make up about 20% of our primary energy consumption.
Having such a high percent of our primary energy production as heat, not transportation fuels or electricity, certainly is unusual, but then again, we love us some hot water and use it aplenty;) Also, the geothermal heat displaces electric and/or oil/natural gas room and water heating in homes and businesses.
---
** It was actually discovered by accident that we can produce geo straight from lava when a geo well at the Krafla volcanic system accidentally drilled into the lava dome. The lava backed up the well a couple dozen meters and then stopped. At first considering the well a loss, they decided to try to turn it into a production well, and it turned out that it actually works.;)
Vanadium redox cells are typically cited as over 10000 cycles. I don't know what simulations you refer to, but given that the average US household uses 6000kWh/year, that's an average of 0.7kW, and assuming an average of 3 people per household would mean that 1MWh per person (3 MWh per household) would be enough to run it for 180 days. Which sounds utterly absurd, especially once you start building more regional interconnects (heck, they're already talking about adding even *Iceland* to the European grid). Lastly, simulating a "100% scenario" is pointless. What's so wrong with a 90% or a 95% scenario (aka, using existing fossil plants if there's some low-probability shortfall event) if it makes the problem much easier to handle? Lastly, existing hydro plants in most regions can be uprated and used as battery buffers, holding months worth of power in their reservoir behind them. Pumped hydro's added cost per kWh sold is usually cited in the $0.01-$0.02/kWh range. It's cheap enough that it's starting to be used extensively in some places (such as China), not to support renewables, but simply to avoid having to build new power plants to meet daytime demand.
It should be noted that even PbA cells are a viable option in some locations (I believe there's a huge bank up in Alaska). It all depends on the scenario.
It's trying, but there's a number of roadblocks, mostly regulatory. There's a big paperwork backlog - 3/4ths of the permit applications in Honolulu are for rooftop solar installs. Also, it was just recently that they overturned the law banning more than 15% of the grid's capacity to be from home rooftops without getting an explicit exception (it's now 25%). Before that, you had to do a long interconnect impact study for each install. Getting paid for sending power back into the grid is fairly new itself, less than a year old. On the commercial side, the utilities are building most of their new capacity as renewables, but they don't want to toss away their investment on older generation hardware. So overall it's just moving at a snail's pace.
Slashdot Mirror
Mix in some snow and hail at the same change interval, and you're describing an Icelandic spring ;)
I bet you that it will get dark tonight, and then brighten up again tomorrow. Care to take my bet, or want to modify your broad-based claim?
Don't anthropomorphize nature, it hates it when you do that.
Strange your weather's not been warm. I live in Iceland and our summer has been crazy-warm and sunny, like 5C over average most days and almost no rain.
Not that I'm complaining, mind you ;)
Apparently in your (and his) worlds:
* Global warming predicts that every location on Earth will increase in temperature at roughly the same rate and roughly the same time
* A region cannot have statistically anomalous warmth driven by an external forcing unless *every* region on earth has statistically anomalous warmth driven by an external forcing.
* Marble Bar, Australia = Earth
* Heat wave = high temperatures in absolute numbers, instead of the standard definition, relative to an area's baseline average.
Wow, combining "un-peer-reviewed claims by TV weathermen" with "wikipedia" with "proof by ghost reference" (worst heat wave != most days over 37.8C in a place which already has an average January high of over 41C), whose closest resemblance to saying what he claims it says is a reference to a non-peer-reviewed web page from before the heat waves in question discussed by this paper.
Wow, I'm totally sold now, thanks for linking that!
Because, as always, peer-reviewed work is to be scoffed at while wild un-peer-reviewed claims by TV weathermen are to be taken at face value.
I don't know about iDeal, but I'm always appalled at how much trouble Americans have with securing their identity. It's not that hard:
Step 1) Have a *public* identifier for you. None of this "if you know the social security number" or "if you know all or part of a credit card number" or such nonsense.
Step 2) Have one or more *private* passcodes or other authentication schemes (really, everyone should have those rotating-passcode keychain devices like the banks give out here for use with important stuff). Because the key is public, nobody is dumb enough to use it as a password.
Step 3) Have a single national database which stores information about you, with at a minimum, your name, public ID, and address. This is your *official* contact information.
Step 4) Any major transactions done using your identity, including changing your contact information, involve you being contacted using your official contact information in the database.
This is basically the system we use here in Iceland, and it works very well. Doesn't help us with foreign firms that don't grasp security, however.
Also, what's up with Americans and writing personal checks? Geez, it's the 21st century here...
It isn't. That's my point. People are building more and more hydro at inxcreasing rates, even despite being limited to areas with existing rivers, which are many orders of magnitude rarer than areas that simply have large altitude differences (which is a huge chunk of the entire planet).
Even if you accept that future will be more expensive - which I don't, as power plants and storage mechanisms generally get cheaper over time (modern dams are much cheaper per unit power than early dams, for example) - it needs to increase in price by an *order of magnitude* to be ruled out. Not going to happen.
First off:
1) Hydropower is only a quarter of the world's electricity consumption. That is, roughly 3 quarters of energy-production resources have gone elsewhere. Multiply your figure by four.
2) I don't have a list of 1GW power stations, but Wikipedia has a list of 2GW ones. The breakdown (ones with multiple years are represented as fractions):
Pre-1950: 2
1950-1960: 2,3
1960-1970: 6,5
1970-1980: 10,7
1980-1990: 13,1
1990-2000: 5,3
2000-2010: 8,6
2010-2012: 5,5 extrapolated: to 2020: 18,3
Notice something? Yeah, they're (roughly) being built at significantly increased rates, corresponding to the world's increased power demands and the world's dramatically increasing industrial output. In fact, if you extrapolate the rate of plants being built in the 2010s (note: the one that had completion dates in the future, I omitted, since I had no way to know whether there were other completion dates of plants in the future that weren't listed), you'd get over a quarter of them produced this decade. Just the first three years of the 2010s produced as many large hydro plants as all of the 1990s. And its not like those were three freak years - most of the 1990s production was in the latter 1990s, 3 of them in 1999 alone.
Plus, focusing just on large hydro is probably distorting, since one tends to use up large-hydro opportunities first and then move down to smaller hydro.
Third, the whole argument is moot because *we already have cost figures for pumped hydro*, and they're not expensive. Cost is a measure of the amount of economic output something requires to produce, operate, and maintain. Pumped hydro is usually a little over a penny per kilowatt hour. Given that generating that power costs many times more, potentially even over an order of magnitude more, you can see that the cost to produce, operate, and maintain the pumped hydro plant is an order of magnitude less than the cost to produce, operate, and maintain the power plants. Do you think people are going to stop producing the power plants they need because they're "too expensive" or "take up too much resources"?
Seriously? The the area of the entire continent of Europe? Don't think there's room?
If you're talking about the scale of building that, the scale of building *everything* humans do nowadays is immense. For example, cement is just one component of concrete. The world uses 4,600,000,000,000 (4.6 quadrillion) pounds of cement every year. In concrete terms, that's probably around 20,000,000,000,000 pounds. That number should double to 40,000,000,000,000 pounds of concrete by 2030. That's 243,000 Washington Monuments every year.
Humans build a *LOT* of stuff.
Where are you getting the concept that the space requirements are absurd? Europe consumes about 3000TWh annually, or about 8.2 TWh per day. To store a 24-hour day's power (enough to have an overwhelming majority of your power come from renewables - handling everything but the rare trans-continental multi-source shortfall), that's about 500 BGs. In an area the size of *Europe*. Why do you think this is a problem? I don't get your objection.
To reiterate the point, since you apparently missed it: the Great Lakes are an example of how even extremely poorly-cited natural bodies of water can have huge power generation potentials. It was not a proposal to "recreate the Great Lakes", which would be idiotic. See the calculations elsewhere in this thread that show that for Germany to store nearly a day's worth of power for everyone (assuming 100m elevation changes, 20m-deep reservoirs, and 80% efficiency), it would take less than a tenth of a percent of the country's land (the US equivalent would be "one Delaware or two Rhode Islands to store all of the US's power). On a diversified, geographically-interlinked grid, that kind of power storage could give you at least 90% of your power from clean renewables.
Nope. Iceland's not actually that cold of a country in the winter; we have a maritime climate. Average January temps are barely below freezing. We basically just don't have a summer. Average mid-July highs are like 16C (although this year it must have been more like 20C or so).
Also, those car-warming plugs in cold climates often have low current fuses/breakers - at least I know they do in some spots in America because people were plugging space heaters into them to keep their cars warm for hours while they were gone.
At the very least, the plugs at Kringlan are free.
Actually, I think an electric Super Jeep would be pretty awesome :) And while I know some would disagree, I know I'm not the only one who feels this way.
In case you didn't notice, the Great Lakes already exist.
And nobody's talking about recreating them elsewhere.
Not people in the sort of sunny areas that tend to be the early adopters of solar technology. Their power is primarily in the summer, for air conditioning.
I live in Iceland. We get our heat from geo and our power from a geo/hydro blend.
And? You think there's not the fraction of a percent of land that isn't flat?
Try crunching the numbers some time on how much power can be stored in the US just from the small difference between Lake Superior and Lake Michigan-Huron. It's pretty starggering, despite them being in the Great Plains.
Among other reasons, it's faced opposition from native Hawaiians. Drilling into Pele and all that...
Land area for pumped storage. As described in my post above, a 95-5 solution should take no more than a couple days buffer, perhaps 60kWh per person. Germany's population is about 82m. Assume an average height difference of 100m, only two-reservoir plants (we'll assume no coastal plants), assuming an average reservoir depth of 20m, and a throughput efficiency of 80%, we get 15,7MJ/m = 4,4kWh/m = 13,8 m^2/person = 1132km^2. Germany is 357021 km^2. The lake requirement is a third of a percent of the size of Germany. Where's the problem? Too many land usage? Go with a 90% solution and cut your storage requirements down to maybe 15kWh per person and your lake area down to less than a tenth of a percent of the land of Germany. That'd be like the US having all of its energy stored by one Delaware or two Rhode Islands.
It has to do with the fact that hydrogen fuel is a stupid idea, and while the concept that it is never really sank in, the effects of it (aka, the lack of nearly any hydrogen vehicles, let alone affordable ones) did. So Iceland has been pushing a bit more toward EVs, although not hard yet. I plug my car in the EV charging station at Kringlan - but that's the only one I know of (I'm sure there are more, but they're not common).
It'll come in time.
1) Quite true. Nonetheless, the figure is still quite extreme. The *entire day*'s power consumption for *50 days*? I mean, that's ridiculous, especially on an interconnected grid. If the sun's not shining in Germany, it's probably shining in Morrocco. If the wind isn't blowing in Scotland, it's probably blowing in Greece. Etc. And for those rare cases when *all types* of renewables are underperforming at the *same time*, you then fire up fossil peaking to make up that ~5% or so of your total electricity production. In such a scenario you should need no more than a couple days' worth of storage at most.
2) While wind doesn't track consumption requirements, solar generally does pretty well. Inter-seasonal variations are handled by geographic and generation-mix diversity.
3) This list contradicts your "most expensive" price claim. Plus, citing raw price figures is horribly distorting as so much can affect them (especially taxes and subsidies which vary a lot between countries regardless of levels of subsidy for renewables). Look at Ireland, for example - overwhelmingly fossil fuels, tiny renewable segment, yet they pay more than you for power. Or Sweden for an even more ridiculous example - they're 44% hydropower, which is generally cheap, almost no wind or solar, and yet they pay more than you.
4) "Assured production" for a single wind farm is one of the most stupid and meaningless metrics you could possibly come up with. The figures I've seen cited for wind distributed among farms across a couple hundred kilometers is that about a third of it is as reliable as baseload.
5) The concept that the grid can't deal with intermittency is absurd, because *demand* is already intermittent. Having intermittent demand is for all practical purposes the same as intermittent supply. And the same solutions apply - diversity, distribution, storage, and peaking.
For non-silicon based, it's often under 6 months. And actually solar is usually awfully nice as far as renewable impacts on the grid go, as it roughly tracks people's power consumption demands (several times more power used in the day than at night, more power used on hot, sunny days, etc). And with oil power and those sort of shipping costs, they must have been paying many times the US average for electricity. Solar and batteries should be a no-brainer in terms of payoff time.
Besides, while they may be the first to be essentially 100% solar, they're far from the first to go essentially 100% renewable. Here in Iceland we're essentially 100% geo and hydro for our electricity. Yeah, we're only 320,000 people, but we produce 2/3rds as much power as Ireland (which has 15 times our population). A huge amount of electricity per-capita goes to industry (it's so cheap, electricity-intensive industries like aluminum come here). Of the three aluminum smelters in the country, even the smallest uses more power than all the homes and businesses combined. And we're only at something like 20% of our hydro capacity, 25% of our known conventional geo capacity (plus, geo's not been nearly well enough explored, this doesn't count enhanced geothermal, it doesn't count low-temperature geothermal, and it doesn't count geothermal straight from lava**), the largest wind turbine in this super-windy country is only 30kW, and wave and tidal (there are big waves and tides here) are completely untapped.
Note that electricity isn't the only form of energy that people use. Like I'm sure is the case with Tokelau, we import almost all of our fuel (although there's some new biofuels plants going online which should start to change that here). Also, most of our primary energy is heat. Geothermal currently makes up only a quarter of our electricity production, but it's 2/3rds of our primary energy production (most of it being low temperature geo which we've done nothing to produce electricity from - the water comes out of the wells at usually 100-140C and gets blended with cold water down to the 80C distribution temperature - power is so cheap and abundant here that nobody can justify the cost to generate power from low temperature geo). Fossil fuels (mainly oil) make up about 20% of our primary energy consumption.
Having such a high percent of our primary energy production as heat, not transportation fuels or electricity, certainly is unusual, but then again, we love us some hot water and use it aplenty ;) Also, the geothermal heat displaces electric and/or oil/natural gas room and water heating in homes and businesses.
---
** It was actually discovered by accident that we can produce geo straight from lava when a geo well at the Krafla volcanic system accidentally drilled into the lava dome. The lava backed up the well a couple dozen meters and then stopped. At first considering the well a loss, they decided to try to turn it into a production well, and it turned out that it actually works. ;)
Vanadium redox cells are typically cited as over 10000 cycles. I don't know what simulations you refer to, but given that the average US household uses 6000kWh/year, that's an average of 0.7kW, and assuming an average of 3 people per household would mean that 1MWh per person (3 MWh per household) would be enough to run it for 180 days. Which sounds utterly absurd, especially once you start building more regional interconnects (heck, they're already talking about adding even *Iceland* to the European grid). Lastly, simulating a "100% scenario" is pointless. What's so wrong with a 90% or a 95% scenario (aka, using existing fossil plants if there's some low-probability shortfall event) if it makes the problem much easier to handle? Lastly, existing hydro plants in most regions can be uprated and used as battery buffers, holding months worth of power in their reservoir behind them. Pumped hydro's added cost per kWh sold is usually cited in the $0.01-$0.02/kWh range. It's cheap enough that it's starting to be used extensively in some places (such as China), not to support renewables, but simply to avoid having to build new power plants to meet daytime demand.
It should be noted that even PbA cells are a viable option in some locations (I believe there's a huge bank up in Alaska). It all depends on the scenario.
It's trying, but there's a number of roadblocks, mostly regulatory. There's a big paperwork backlog - 3/4ths of the permit applications in Honolulu are for rooftop solar installs. Also, it was just recently that they overturned the law banning more than 15% of the grid's capacity to be from home rooftops without getting an explicit exception (it's now 25%). Before that, you had to do a long interconnect impact study for each install. Getting paid for sending power back into the grid is fairly new itself, less than a year old. On the commercial side, the utilities are building most of their new capacity as renewables, but they don't want to toss away their investment on older generation hardware. So overall it's just moving at a snail's pace.