I spent 3 months trying to put together a picture of what a 100% renewable energy economy would look like.
I would love to see a detailed write-up about this, or absent that, what do you think is the best currently available write-up on this topic, that comes closest to the truth?
Solar installations have a very limited life span of the order of 10 years.
I’ve yet to delve into it, but RethinkX—a think tank, doubtless with an axe to grind—take similar ingredients and produce a result pointing in the opposite direction: RE is cheap, storage is relatively expensive, so the optimal solution is RE overcapacity with storage filling the gap that remains, and volatile energy prices, often very low, sometimes quite high. A large gas- or coal-fired power plant is not at all optimised for this market, and they don’t advise you to own one. See, for example: https://www.rethinkx.com/energy-lcoe.
I think there are very many moving parts here when dealing with RE intermittency. Grid-scale storage is the obvious one, but there’s also vehicle-to-grid, and all kinds of thermal storage at the point of use (since providing heat and cooling is a major use of electricity, and thermal storage can be cheaper than storing electricity as electricity). Add to that all the principal-agent problems (the landlord owns the HVAC, and the tenant has to grit their teeth and pay for it) and time lags (how long does it take to build a 2GW power plant?)…
I would love to see a detailed write-up about this, or absent that, what do you think is the best currently available write-up on this topic, that comes closest to the truth?
What’s the source of this? I’ve only seen talk of ~30-year lifetimes for solar, for example https://cleantechnica.com/2020/06/30/how-have-expectations-for-useful-life-of-utility-scale-pv-plants-in-the-us-changed-over-time/
I’ve yet to delve into it, but RethinkX—a think tank, doubtless with an axe to grind—take similar ingredients and produce a result pointing in the opposite direction: RE is cheap, storage is relatively expensive, so the optimal solution is RE overcapacity with storage filling the gap that remains, and volatile energy prices, often very low, sometimes quite high. A large gas- or coal-fired power plant is not at all optimised for this market, and they don’t advise you to own one. See, for example: https://www.rethinkx.com/energy-lcoe.
I think there are very many moving parts here when dealing with RE intermittency. Grid-scale storage is the obvious one, but there’s also vehicle-to-grid, and all kinds of thermal storage at the point of use (since providing heat and cooling is a major use of electricity, and thermal storage can be cheaper than storing electricity as electricity). Add to that all the principal-agent problems (the landlord owns the HVAC, and the tenant has to grit their teeth and pay for it) and time lags (how long does it take to build a 2GW power plant?)…