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Re:Wind and solar are cheaper than thought, admits UK govern... by grey-area on Thursday August 27, 2020 @03:39PM (#24297743)
No.

Clearly you only need a small proportion of grid power in storage to cope with peaks.

There are also multiple ways to smooth load - overcapacity, battery storage, pumped storage, load shedding, pricing. These are solved problems which just need a bit more work and investment, and many countries already use pumped storage extensively.

Re:Wind and solar are cheaper than thought, admits UK govern... by oblio on Thursday August 27, 2020 @03:48PM (#24297845)
The only example that I know of is Norway which is kind of the holy grail of hydro, in general:

1. Small population.

2. Pretty tall mountains and sparsely populated mountains (see 1.)

3. Quite high yearly rainfall levels.

4. Very rich country.

5. Country with a very low level of corruption and from what I know, pretty efficient at building new infrastructure.

Is there an example of an "average" country having decent levels of pumped hydro storage at a level that's above 0.5% of the country's needs?

Re:Wind and solar are cheaper than thought, admits UK govern... by grey-area on Friday August 28, 2020 @04:14AM (#24302523)
The UK has had pumped storage since 1963, there are more planned around the world - this is neither exotic nor particularly hard, the only constraint is land, and as I mentioned there are multiple other solutions.

Scotland has already entirely met its needs with renewables this year. This can and will be expanded to other nations in time.

Re:Wind and solar are cheaper than thought, admits UK govern... by myself248 on Thursday August 27, 2020 @04:28PM (#24298260)
Oh, just a few oddballs nobody's ever heard of: Switzerland, Austria, Portugal, Japan, Spain, Italy, South Africa, Belgium, Ukraine, South Korea, Poland, France, Australia, Thailand, Germany, UK, India, US, China, Russia.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...

Re:Wind and solar are cheaper than thought, admits UK govern... by coryrc on Thursday August 27, 2020 @05:36PM (#24298973)
That's power, not energy.