On Wed, Jun 19, 2013 at 4:00 PM, Eugen Leitl <eu...@leitl.org> wrote: [...snip links...] > Notice that most of it is very predictable, several days > in advance.
You are right up to the point that global climate change bites. And even without a climate apocalypse, I thought the margin of error with all such predictions was rather hefty - 15-20%? > The problem with gas peak plants is that they run just a few > weeks per year, and are not economic without subsidies. > The reason coal hasn't gone the way of the dodo (and the > nuke) is political. It does increasingly look there will > be a premature exit from coal. Coal will always be needed - if not in Europe, then in China or India. We are not going to stop digging as long as there's profit. >> renewable energy aplenty. This is a problem that won't be solved until >> we can figure out how to store and normalize the energy or cheaply > > MWh scale battery storage is making very good advance, and EV > battery storage does it at well. You need about an EV scale battery > for night cycling. Nanobatteries are a possibility - ten - twenty years away. > Germany's natural gas grid can currently buffer 3 months. > We know natural gas lines can tolerate 5-15% of hydrogen without > refitting, so hydrogen from water electrolysis and synmethane > (via Sabatier) are likely ways to absorb surplus of renewables > (which already happens regularly, and will become a permanent > fixture rather soon). Pipelines are not close to renewable sources - the Nord Stream runs subsea for example - and the transport infrastructure to integrate renewables like you say is expensive - this is why they are just ideas with marginal implementations waiting for something big to change. Pipelines, even subsea pipelines are vulnerable to political unrest - and the world is going to be frothing with unrest for the next decade or two. You can protect an off shore oil platform with a near shore airbase, but a pipeline requires a network of spies and client states. That's hard to build and maintain without cold war mentality. In any case the investments in protecting this sort of thing are huge - and wipe out potential savings. > It's interesting that France import electricity during winter > from nonuclear Germany -- for electric heating -- and in the > summer -- because during heat spells they have to shut down > the reactors. Yeah, but the peak production capacity is more than France can handle or distribute effectively, so it's not as if they are lacking the capacity to produce significant amounts of power - nearly 30% of EU's power is French. France lags behind in wind power and other renewable sources: 0.1% of production
