> There's a few papers on managing the mix of this but theyre not widely read or reported on.
Again, great of you to cite these papers.
> For a long time the carbon lobby pretended that lithium ion batteries were the only thing that could be used to manage renewable intermittency. This was precisely because they wanted to charactize it being technology that was impossibly far fetched. In reality it's the most expensive of many options and the best last resort but as a result most people think it's just "the solution".
Okay then: if not lithium ion batteries, what is the storage solution? Pumped hydro is geographically limited. That leaves approaches still in testing, like thermal storage or hydrogen storage.
> However, if you're Germany and you've got a calm and overcast day the most cost effective approach is to tell heavy non time sensitive industrial users like aluminum smelters to ramp down production today and ramp it up extra high tomorrow when it's very sunny and windy. The cost of doing this is comparatively very low for many users like smelters and we've barely scratched the surface of what's possible in this space.
So we have to tell people not to use energy. Because we have no effective way of addressing intermittency.
You're assuming that industries can just "ramp up extra high" when there's excess energy. Not all industries work like that. If a factory uses 100 MW at peak capacity it can't just produce 3x as much product if you feed it 300 MW. The reality is that few industries can be flexible like this.
What about things like street lights? Or sewage and water distribution? Hospitals, data centers, and essential services? There's plenty of things that cannot shift load like this.
For a long time the carbon lobby pretended that lithium ion batteries were the only thing that could be used to manage renewable intermittency. This was precisely because they wanted to charactize it being technology that was impossibly far fetched. In reality it's the most expensive of many options and the best last resort but as a result most people think it's just "the solution".
The price of even those has plummeted though and even they are being rolled out (e.g. in Hawaii, next to solar farms). That's still a lot cheaper than hinkley point C.
However, if you're Germany and you've got a calm and overcast day the most cost effective approach is to tell heavy non time sensitive industrial users like aluminum smelters to ramp down production today and ramp it up extra high tomorrow when it's very sunny and windy. The cost of doing this is comparatively very low for many users like smelters and we've barely scratched the surface of what's possible in this space.
So, investing in capacity on the presumption that dealing with the intermittency costs of solar and wind will be an enormous 160% of production costs is flat out insane without subsidies.
Hence why it's fairly clear that the UK wanted hinkley point c for other reasons - i.e. to keep nuclear capacity and know how local so that the nuclear arsenal can be maintained.