Actually, it's not impossible at all. The UK grid needs about 3 times the amount of wind and much more solar and 2 terawatts of underground hydrogen storage.

There's enough salt caverns around the UK that can give it that storage, and the hydrogen can be manufactured via electrolysis when the wind and solar is producing too much. It's not very efficient, but renewables are cheap.

It CAN be done.

The Australian grid is rather different, it's a LOT closer to the equator and their renewables are a lot more consistent, so they need a lot less storage in percentage terms.

Not really, but the grid operator is basically the government for the grid, and they're highly incentivized to not fuck up. They're the ones that sent out the request for quotes.

FYI as of 2021 the UK had 1.3 GW(h) of battery storage on the grid:

https://www.solarpowerportal.c...

I'm not sure what the total storage is now, it's going to be over 1.5 GW(h) with this installation, and probably a lot more. Note that large batteries aren't needed, it's the total battery storage that's important.

The UK grid operator was particularly keen on getting batteries on it, because the HVDC interconnectors to the continent have been unreliable, and they tend to suddenly break with no warning. That has meant that the grid needs to have a couple of gigawatt of spinning reserve instead, particularly spinning overnight, but with enough batteries they can shut most of that down into hot standby.

The last outage the grid had, due to a lightning strike, they didn't quite have enough battery, and that meant they had to do load shedding and that caused chaos. They should have enough battery now to keep it up long enough if there's a repeat to get backup power running and avoid any load shedding.

The other thing these batteries can do is help smooth out the production curve. If we had enough batteries to smooth out the evening power demand, the CCGT gas turbines would be much more efficient. When they first start up they use about twice as much fuel per kWh until the second cycle kicks in. If they start up less, costs should go down. But we'd need a lot more batteries to make that work.

No, there is apparently still one AC tie switch in Dayton, Texas that has been used only once in its history (after Hurricane Ike).

You're right, they do have to synchronize before they connect, but it's not usually a monumental task.

Amusingly the UK national grid was first connected up by technicians playing around in the night without any permission, they just synched up the regional grids that there were at the time and closed the switches- just to see what would happen, as you do! Worked fine, and the following year it was done permanently.

I think it was more that he was blatantly lying about it, not that it was renewables per se.

That, and the plain fact that the failures were very avoidable, that similar conditions had happened before both in Texas and elsewhere, and that the recommendations were simply not followed, meant that it was never going to look good for them.

vs

dead from cats

(hint: those evolutionarily optimised cats win this race, hundreds of time for every one bird killed by a wind turbine, killing birdies is what cats do really well.)

I live near multiple wind turbines, and those are virtually never real problems. Unless you're VERY close to a wind turbine you can't hear it, and shutting down wind turbines to avoid the shadow sweeping across residential areas- something that will normally only happen at very limited times of day and only then at certain times of the year, are very real things that are done and cause very little loss of income for the owners of the turbine. On the contrary people generally LIKE wind turbines near them once they're actually up.

Inb4 being kept in cage, and kept after death.

It was government mandates (in the United States, Germany and Denmark) that made wind power cheap enough to (as it were) self-deploy though via the 'free market'. The free market is just a tool that's used by the government.

> Now, how is Texas going to replace the natural gas, when the wind is not available 2/3 of the time?

That's not true, wind is always producing. Using the standard models there's zero chance of zero output. You're confusing capacity factor with availability. About a quarter to a third of the maximum wind power is available 95% of the time.

Renewables are not just solar and solar+wind has different characteristics to either alone. Anyway, in the round you are incorrect:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

> You seem to be conflating generation with consumption. Denmark is consuming large amounts of imported nuclear, hydro and gas-fired power.

But all of Denmark's wind power production is consumed. Your claim was that less than half of it is. Your claim is false.

> Anyone can generate more PV electricity than they consume, if they can sell to the grid and buy back.

Virtually all of grid-connected PV potential production is consumed worldwide right now. Not less than half.

> Until too many people try to do that.

There is nowhere in the world where they throw away half of their renewable grid connected electricity, and it's difficult to see how that could ever happen.

> Just saying that renewables don't replace coal, not even 50%, the way that gas has done, without storage.

Well, Denmark is on 43+% wind power right now, without any storage, so I'd say that claim is suspect. But it does depend on details of the situation, how well connected the grid is etc. Denmark is fairly well connected so it can sell excess power and import as and when it needs more.

Nuclear can't do much more than baseload though, whereas natural gas can do peakload and baseload and work around renewables. That means that after you replace the coal with gas, you then install a shitload of renewables, and use them preferentially only kicking the natural gas CCGT generators as a backup. So natural gas's capacity and flexibility matters far more in the long run, and costs and generation are dominated by the renewables.

Having some nuclear on a grid is a good idea, but having a lot gets in the way of cheap renewables.