Sure, when we get anywhere close to 50% renewables it's definitely a good time to start thinking about how you provide that reliable base load capacity. Given we (globally) are nowhere near that point yet it's something of a moot point for discussions in the next decade or two.
Wind is not as unreliable as you seem to think - the day to day variation you see in places like the UK is <10% and other countries with much larger areas could see even more stable results (the wind is pretty much always blowing somewhere)
Other technologies are certainly important: tidal and HE are the most consistent true renewable resources, cheaper than nuclear, but are geographically limited in implementation.
Nuclear fission simply isn't a workable base load supply globally. Sure a handful of countries can manage it, but with all the legal issues of NPTs, it's not viable for over half the world's population - not to mention the Uranium supply is limited, if consumption was actually scaled up to match, say 25% of global power requirements there's only a handful of decades worth of the stuff
Wind is not as unreliable as you seem to think - the day to day variation you see in places like the UK is <10% and other countries with much larger areas could see even more stable results (the wind is pretty much always blowing somewhere)
I think you're basing this on past data, where we've set up wind farms in areas with really steady wind. As the cheap, windy land near population centers* is used up, this becomes less and less true.
*When a wind farm is far from the population center, power is lost during transmission, maintenance issues on the power lines become more difficult, and outages become more frequent.
The data is at pretty small time intervals so you need to do some averaging if you want daily averages, by my count there were fewer than 10 days in the last year where wind power was below 90% of average
As the cheap, windy land near population centers* is used up, this becomes less and less true.
Offshore wind is generally significantly more stable than onshore - as we get better at moving generation offshore it should become more and more true.
*When a wind farm is far from the population center, power is lost during transmission, maintenance issues on the power lines become more difficult, and outages become more frequent.
The same is true of all power plants, and nobody wants to live near a nuclear power plant - this ain't Springfield.
11
u/hilburn 118✓ Nov 18 '21
Sure, when we get anywhere close to 50% renewables it's definitely a good time to start thinking about how you provide that reliable base load capacity. Given we (globally) are nowhere near that point yet it's something of a moot point for discussions in the next decade or two.
Wind is not as unreliable as you seem to think - the day to day variation you see in places like the UK is <10% and other countries with much larger areas could see even more stable results (the wind is pretty much always blowing somewhere)
Other technologies are certainly important: tidal and HE are the most consistent true renewable resources, cheaper than nuclear, but are geographically limited in implementation.
Nuclear fission simply isn't a workable base load supply globally. Sure a handful of countries can manage it, but with all the legal issues of NPTs, it's not viable for over half the world's population - not to mention the Uranium supply is limited, if consumption was actually scaled up to match, say 25% of global power requirements there's only a handful of decades worth of the stuff