Gar writes: > If wind and solar become a major part of the grid, they > will require large scale transmission regardless of > whether they generated in an extremely dentralized manner.
I don't think the penetration of renewable energy will absolutely *require* large scale transmission. It can also be done without it. And this is important! The debate in Europe about transmission is more a political-economic debate than a technological debate. Europeans say (and I agree) that the big corporations slow down renewable energy wherever they can. Feed-in tariffs have been so successful and have been able to introduce renewable energy much faster than anybody thought because the initiative for renewable energy investment was taken out of the hands of the big utility corporations (RWE, E-on, Vattenfall, etc) and placed in the hands of families, farms, and small businesses. The big corportions have not given up; now they are trying to use transmission to strangle renewable energy. The Desertec project, which brings Renewable Energy from North Africa to Central Europe, looks impressive on paper and it is probably also technically feasible, but it is not politically feasible. It will take 20 years before the necessary HVDC lines through Spain and Italy are sited, approved, and built. This is why Hermann Scheer, before he died, was opposed the Desertec project: while pretending they want to promote renewable energy, Siemens, RWE, and the other Desertec partners really retard it because they know that the implementation will take a looong time. This is why progressive European energy theorists stress that it is not necessary to have such huge transmission lines. I don't know what you mean by cheap, Gar, but renewable electricity is becoming increasingly cheap, and if you can develop storage which is only 50% efficient but which is local and has enough capacity, then this can still be considered cheap. For instance the Austrian firm SolarFuel GmbH http://www.solar-fuel.net/en/solarfuel-gmbh/ turns renewable energy into hydrogen by electrolysis and then the hydrogen into methane (using CO2 from the air!) for feeding it into the natural gas pipelines. The efficiency of this process is very low, they say it is below 50%, and its theoretical maximum attainable efficiency seems to be only 60%. But the big advantage is that it has practically unlimited capacity (unlike pumped or compressed air storage) and the natural gas pipeline network already exists! Right now the Germans often cannot use the electricity of their windmills at the coast at all because the electric transmission lines do not exist. But the natural gas network does exist, therefore SolarFuel's strategy is feasible. (By the way, this is a situation very similar to the US: we have a great national natural gas pipeline network, but no national electric transmission network.) The expectation in Europe is that storage technology will take off just as renewable electricity took off, and this will enable renewable electricity to reach 100% penetration without a huge electric transmission highway system which would take decades to build and therefore would retard the full penetration of renewables by decades. I will send another email to the list about storage in Europe. Hans _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
