The power grid becomes unstable after > 20% of it runs on renewable energy.
They called me crazy 7 years ago.
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Obama Declares War on Coal June 2nd | Page 4 | CivFanatics Forums
I thought that solar + wind power can't go above 20% of an interconnected power grid without disaster.
(If a country consumes 10000MWh in a year, they better not get above 2000MWh from wind+solar)
Wind + Solar are fundamentally unreliable power sources.
(I like reliable hydro power, so I don't count it towards the 20% figure even if it is renewable energy)
I don't care if a country is 60% Wind+Solar if they are hooked up to another country that supplies it with endless amounts of power on cloudly and windless days.
Let's see where we were in 2020 since that is good data.
Europe-27 - Solar+Wind 19%
(All the countries connect together into effectively one power grid with various levels of connectivity)
EU Power Sector 2020 | Electricity Trends | Ember (ember-climate.org)
USA - Solar+Wind 11.6%
(All the lower 48 states, except Texas, connect together into an eastern and western power grid)
(*I can't figure out how to pull Texas out of that 11.6%. The real number should be a bit lower than 11.6% for the lower 48 states)
Renewables = 20.6% of US Electricity in 2020 - CleanTechnica
Texas - Solar+Wind 25%
Graphic Shows What Percentage of Texas' Energy Is Renewable (newsweek.com)
Australia - Solar+Wind 18%
Electricity generation | energy.gov.au
If my theory is correct, as of 2020 Texas should be a permanent yearly disaster.
Europe and Australia should be flirting with electricity problems.
I think this is currently an unresolvable problem.
Experiments where a third or a quarter of the grid run on this stuff, I can't make it work with my feeble brain.
Solar could be fixed if the entire world was connected into 1 power grid perhaps.
![Hmm :hmm: :hmm:](/images/smilies/hm.gif)
Or if it was in space being beamed down.
Wind power could be fixed if there was a cheap way to store all that energy somehow at a massive scale.
I made this thread because this article here told me I'm quite wrong.
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Three Myths About Renewable Energy and the Grid, Debunked - Yale E360
Renewable energy skeptics argue that because of their variability, wind and solar cannot be the foundation of a dependable electricity grid. But the expansion of renewables and new methods of energy management and storage can lead to a grid that is reliable and clean.
BY AMORY B. LOVINS AND M. V. RAMANA • DECEMBER 9, 2021
Gah!
We just have to use ___(has not been invented yet)___ gigantic amounts of cheap energy storage technology and we can build a power grid out of wind+solar in the next few years.
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