ZackM said:
niveklaen said:
rhfarmer said:
niveklaen said:
I hate to agree with the fossil fuel crowd as a general rule, but wind power is very inconsistent - sometimes the wind blows and sometimes it does not - and while the sun is reliable, so is night time and for that matter, bad weather can also cut into solar power at unpredictable times. Power systems that rely heavily on solar and wind power need battery backup which is currently quite expensive. Elon Musk is trying to fix this by building his giga plant, but until Musk solves all mankinds problems (I give him a 50/50 shot of succeeding in the next 50 years), reliability is a real problem for renewable power.
Just type "batteries to store renewable energy" into google and pick the news source that you trust most - there are about a hundred articles describing this very real problem with renewable energy.
The alternative is burning stuff. No drawbacks there.
Oh no doubt renewable is the way to go, but I was responding to someone who was mocking the reliability issue for being bad science when the reliability issue is the one true technical hurdle left to jump. The anti science crowd spouts plenty of false stuff, when they happen to express something that is true we should not pretend that they are wrong
Large scale storage is an issue. Reliability is not an issue. The sun is literally the most reliable thing in our world. So reliable, in fact, that every human civilization to ever exist used/uses it to organize their collective lives.
Deliberately misinterpreting an argument to make it sound ridiculous is not helpful. Solar and wind power cannot
reliably supply an electrical grid without battery. That is the
reliability issue with renewables. Advocates for renewable energy routinely refer to this as a
reliability issue.
http://www.ucsusa.org/clean-energy/how- ... rage-works
"Energy storage plays an important role in this balancing act and helps to create a more flexible and
reliable grid system."
https://www.ecowatch.com/how-better-bat ... 97909.html
"Utilities need to deliver
reliable and steady energy by balancing supply and demand. While today they can usually handle the fluctuations that solar and wind power present to the grid by adjusting their operations, as the amount of energy supplied by renewables grows, better battery storage is crucial."
http://time.com/4756648/batteries-clean ... enewables/
“Networks care about
reliability,” says Logan Goldie-Scot, an energy-storage analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... able-power
"Big batteries can house electricity that can be dispatched when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining, making renewable energy more
reliable."
https://www.eastcountymagazine.org/eart ... ble-energy
"merely lowering the production costs for existing technologies by a third won’t provide the quantum leap in storage capacity needed to make intermittent renewables as
reliable as traditional 'baseload'”
https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... s-angeles/
"Big, grid-sized batteries can run into the millions of dollars, but the damages from blackouts and power surges caused by wildly fluctuating voltages can easily run into the billions. 'You can get some interesting effects on the grid which are not good if the voltage gets too high or you get some
reliability issues,'"
It is ridiculous to quibble with a conservative's use of this description when it is the very description routinely used by renewable energy advocates.