Obama’s advisers just dismantled a key myth about the future of clean energy

[applegrove]

Obama’s advisers just dismantled a key myth about the future of clean energy

By Chris Mooney at the Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/06/21/obamas-advisers-just-dismantled-a-key-myth-about-the-future-of-clean-energy/?postshare=6821466527919892&tid=ss_tw

SNIP............


Through new administration moves and paired announcements by industry and utility companies, the expected upshot of the new initiatives is “at least 1.3 gigawatts of additional storage procurement or deployment in the next five years,” the White House said.

The Council of Economic Advisers report amounts to the intellectual backup for these endeavors. It finds that two key trends — managing the grid’s electricity requirements at a given time through innovations such as “demand response,” and a greater proliferation of batteries and other energy storage technologies — can substantially ameliorate the very real problems caused by the variability of wind and solar and “support further increases” in the deployment of these electricity sources.

Granted, more wind and solar “will require a re-envisioning of the management of the grid,” the report notes. But it argues that this re-envisioning is not only possible, it’s already underway.

The key problem is that with more wind and especially more solar on the grid, you reach a situation where solar can be doing a great deal of work for supplying electricity during the middle of the day, when it’s most plentiful — but also one in which demand for electricity rises steeply, even as solar availability declines, in the evening. This means that other energy sources, such as natural gas, will have to ramp up very rapidly to close the gap, and this is quite expensive — unless, that is, there is a way to mitigate the steepness of this daily rise in demand.

............SNIP

[hunter]

1. Germany solved this problem.

They simply kept their coal fired plants running.

I'm certain the U.S.A. will pursue similar pragmatic solutions.

The only way to quit fossil fuels is to quit fossil fuels, but nobody is willing to do it.

Global warming is going to end this civilization.