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stevey_frac t1_j7ysn4t wrote

Reply to comment by goodsam2 in Renewables are on track to satiate the world's appetite for electricity by ForHidingSquirrels

Because you don't just use all solar?

You mix solar, with geo-seperated wind farms, and existing hydro resources.

It tends to be sunny during the day and windy at night. It tends to be sunny in the summer and windy in winter. They kind of naturally dovetail. Also, off -Shore wind has incredibly high capacity factors...

Batteries, especially cheap and durable LFP batteries can definitely help cover peak loads, and then we start talking long scale storage, with things like ammonia / hydrogen storage, where we can start storing weeks worth of energy.

And even still, you probably have natural gas turbines hanging around for a few decades for those low periods, but we use them less and less as we increase storage and over build our wind and solar installs.

Huge thermal storage for industrial process heat is also coming.

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goodsam2 t1_j7z6raw wrote

>And even still, you probably have natural gas turbines hanging around for a few decades for those low periods, but we use them less and less as we increase storage and over build our wind and solar installs.

That's not the 100% promised that I don't think we have answers to. We have answers for the next step for a decade+ but don't know the grid at 100% carbon free.

With geothermal like you mentioned in your other comment the math all works fine on top of already built hydro.

The study I always talks about 80% renewables with 12 hours of batteries (which is a shit ton) and 20% firm hydro, nuclear geothermal, biomass etc.

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stevey_frac t1_j830yme wrote

I mean, the batteries are already coming. Ontario is bringing a 250 MW battery facility online point the next two years, as a part of a plan to deploy 1500 MW worth of battery capacity.

That's nearly 10% of our average demand being supplied by batteries, and it's cost effective to do so...

We can charge them with cheap overnight power, and use it to trim our peaks... Or prevent wind turbine from curtailing by starting to charge our battery banks.

12h hours of battery storage for our province should come out to only about 20 billion assuming you can do it with $100/kwh with LFP cells.

Considering we just spent $13 billion on a nuclear refurbishment, this doesn't seem crazy levels of investment at all.

My number might be a bit optimistic, but I'm assuming building the biggest battery plant in the world will net you some discounts.

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