Re:Germany boosts renewables with “biggest energy policy ref...
by lkbm on Wednesday April 06, 2022 @03:48PM
(#30936683)
Oh, I assume it's much more expensive than nuclear. Personally, I tend to think of nuclear as renewable, though I guess it's not really; just carbon-neutral.
But even without nuclear I'd think it's viable, albeit expensive. You have to overbuild, add a lot of storage, and interconnect the continent (and maybe northern Africa) with high voltage transmission lines.
Domestically, night time isn't the big deal for Germany. They're 20% wind and only 8.5% solar[0]. They just need to be able to trade their wind output with countries whose wind blows at a different time.
Their geography seems like it would be good for pumped hydro storage, but they only have ~6GW capacity as of 2019[1], so maybe it's not.
[0] https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Economic-Sectors-Enterpris...
Is this even possible? Doesn't it mean that renewable production fluctuates no more than 20%, throughout the whole year? Or, are you talking instantaneously, daytime, ideal conditions? It seems like grid scale storage that could handle these massive fluctuations (like nighttime) are pretty far off.
It would be interesting to see the cost analysis of that vs nuclear.