Humanity's Test

The latest report from the Renewable Energy Policy Network for the Twenty First Century (sponsored by the United Nations)[1] is witness to is a significant deceleration in the growth rate of wind and solar capacity increases. For wind energy, the yearly capacity growth rate has subsided from about 20% up to 2010 to around 14% now. Solar capacity growth has decelerated from around 40% to around 20%. Continue reading →

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Any transition to weather-dependent energy sources (wind and solar) faces two major hurdles. Firstly, in the absence of cheap massive-scale energy storage, they need to be balanced by other sources that can be easily ramped up and ramped down. In nations such as Canada and Norway, which have abundant hydroelectric capacity not impacted by possible climate change induced drought conditions, this may not be a problem. For countries that can import and export relatively significant and variable amounts of power from and to other countries, such as Germany[1] and Denmark[2], the problem may also be somewhat reduced. At least until such renewables provide a significant amount of the energy supply, Germany only reached 5.9% electricity share for solar and 13.3% for wind in 2015 (with electricity being less than half of energy usage). As nuclear and coal-fired power stations do not lend themselves to rapidly varying output, dispatchable gas-fired power stations have been the logical fallback. As the penetration of wind and solar increase, the reliance on these gas-fired sources becomes much greater. The same capacity is being paid for twice, once for the wind and solar installations and secondly for the reliable variable-output fossil-fueled backup capacity. Once the cost of such standby capacity is taken into account, the relative cost of wind and solar is greatly increased[3]. Continue reading →

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