“Without technological breakthroughs in efficient, large scale energy storage, it will be difficult to rely on intermittent renewables for much more than 20-30 percent of our electricity.” Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy - 2010.
https://grist.org/article/2010-02-22-energy-secretary-steven...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewab...
Norway has a lot of hydro which they used the revenues from North Sea oil to install. (Their geography and population density also helps.)
I don't know, that's pretty impressive. Maybe they have international connectors with other countries? I think Germany buys Nuclear power from France? or maybe they have a super stable kind of wind.
We do not have a date for when fossil fuels will be removed from the energy grid. No date, no plan, no strategy, nothing. What we do have is three distinct plans in order to address the stability problem from renewables.
1: Continuing subsidize fossil fuel plants to operate in ready mode for when demands exceeds that of renewables. Oil for now, natural gas in the future.
2: Expand the ability to buy fossil fueled energy from nearby countries for which we sell our green energy. One can pretend that the import of dirty energy does not exist if the total amount of green export over a year is higher than the import.
3: Future technology that does not exist yet and tend to change from year to year based on what currently sounds like interesting-but-decades-from-being-invested-in tech. This year it is wind to hydrogen in dedicated ocean windfarms with massive pipelines of hydrogen, burned in retrofitted natural gas power plants. It has the upside that more natural gas power plants (and pipelines for natural gas) can be built in the pretense that at some later date we can use that wind produced hydrogen if it ever get built.
The result is investments and subsidies goes to mix of renewables and fossil fuels, which is a far cry from 100% renewables.
I am reminded of the quote attributed to Arthur C Clarke.
If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
There are scientists and engineers who say getting to a 100% renewable grid is possible.
Just the production side, the cost in a 2019 study put the numbers around $7-9 per kg of hydrogen. This does not take into the account the cost of the pipeline, the storage facility, or the gas powered power plant. Remember that return of investment only occurs when demands actually exceeds that of cheaper renewable production, unless government steps in and adds subsidies like it does today with oil.
Is massive amounts of hydrogen a cheaper and safer alternative to nuclear? Given the lack of commercial built and operated hydrogen wind farms I suspect the answer is no on the commercial side. On the safety side it would be interesting to hear about operating large liquid hydrogen pipelines and storage facilities.
Any energy system large enough to power the world will be a very expensive thing. Fortunately, the world economy is also a very large thing, and can pay for it.
We can say with some confidence that while this renewable energy system will be expensive, it will be less expensive than a nuclear energy system that serves the same purpose, and likely cheaper than a system with any substantial amount of nuclear energy.
> Given the lack of commercial built and operated hydrogen wind farms
This is a completely bogus argument in an environment where natural gas is still plentiful and legal and its carbon largely untaxed. The CO2 tax needed to get to wind farms + hydrogen being competitive is likely much less than the CO2 needed to get nuclear to be competitive (against natural gas).
With enough batteries and 2x-3x power production over demand you can have 100% renewable grid.
It might require to cut amazon forest and cover it with solar panels, but possible, yes.
As long as you are able to scale your storage, you'll be able to fill it up with solar energy.
And sure, you can imagine a power grid that's smart enough to handle all of that, but implementation of something like that isn't any faster than the construction of more nuclear power.