Comment Re:how many homes was that? (Score 2, Informative) 99
People are in denial about the implications of intermittency. An intermittent supply is not the same product as a dispatchable supply. You cannot supply your local supermarket with a ton of lettuce on August 1 and claim to have met its annual needs for lettuce. A delivery of a ton on August 1 is not the same product as a ton delivered in weekly installments year round, when people actually want to buy it. Perishable goods, notice?
To use the intermittent supply you have to make it dispatchable at the point of use. The only way of doing this at the moment is by rapid start gas peaker plants. Or diesel plants maybe. So the effort to get to net zero means you have to build more gas plants and use them more often, as wind becomes a larger proportion of your generating capacity. This is not just me saying that, the UK Government recently committed to a new building program of gas generation, for exactly that reason.
There is a study by the Royal Society in the UK on the storage requirements which the UK needs if its to get to Net Zero. It takes account of actual UK weather conditions going back decades. (Why had no-one thought to do that earlier?). Their estimate was that it will require 900 caverns to be excavated and sealed and filled with hydrogen (presumably green hydrogen) - and the required storage duration was decades - to cover for the predictable but occasional calm summers that are found in the record.
The question you have to answer, for the UK as an example, is this. Right now UK demand peaks at around 45GW. There is currently 28GW of wind installed. In the winter you are likely to have at least one period when supply is well below 5GW for at least a week. Suppose demand stays at this level. How much wind do you need installed to meet the extra 40GW+ for at least a full week? You'll need something like 400GW, and a lot of storage to go with it. Its impossible.
When the country is converted to EVs and heat pumps, peak demand will be at least double. So this is over 100GW. Get ready to install 1,000GW of wind. And storage. And maintain this wind, which will be offshore in the North Sea. Its impossible.
People now have the idea that you can use the wind to charge storage, during periods of low demand, for instance. No, you can't, because you cannot install enough storage to cover the shortfall. Sometimes people fantasize about using car batteries for this. They have not done the sums. It will only be a small fraction of what is needed.
There are two choices. One is, you can go to an electric society, with EVs and heat pumps and most industrial processes electrified. In that case, get ready to install lots of gas and coal generation. Perhaps superheated coal. Nasty and messy, in the case of coal, but it will work, it will generate the required power. Or nuclear maybe.
Or, you could take the country to wind and solar, in which case get ready to abandon converting to EVs and heat pumps and electrifying industry, because you are not going to have reliable and available supply. So you'll have to stick with ICE and oil and gas boilers and even then it will be messy, you'll need lots of gas backup and probably power rationing as well.
The one thing that is not going to happen is at the same time a move to wind and solar for power generation and an electrification of transport and home heating. Because any political party which seriously tries it will be out of power for several generations when the resulting social and economic disaster becomes clear.
The question is, which country will be the first to have a nationwide weeks long blackout with cold restart due to efforts to implement these green fantasies?
Until a couple of weeks ago, the UK would have been a safe bet, both large political parties showing the same obstinate ignorance about energy planning. Now that the Conservative Party has started its U-turn with the gas build program its not so clear. They are still the favorites, because of the almost certain Labour government that will come to power in November, and those guys are seriously proposing net zero power generation by 2030, and opposing the gas build out. But it may be that once the gas build out gets started, reason will prevail and they will continue with it. If they reverse, the UK will be the winner.
We shall see.