Another day, another ‘grid decarbonisation’ propaganda exercise by the renewables vested interests industry, aka the Profits of Doom: Evans claims, that because fossil fuels contributed a record low 2.4% of energy to the grid for half an hour on 15th April 2024, this somehow debunks arguments that we will never be able to completely decarbonise the grid! This is a ludicrous claim to be making, not backed up by the hard evidence. It’s pure propaganda and Evans is an absolute Green plonker who’s got his filthy hands inside all of our pockets. Because the harder we try to decarbonise the grid, the more the impossibility of the enterprise will become obvious to all, but at the same time, the higher will be the cost to taxpayers and bill payers and the richer will be the fraudsters who are building and investing in the ‘Green’ environment-trashing technology which will fail to achieve the promised sustainable utopia of a 100% carbon free grid.
I agree 100% with your post. Great way to show the problem. There is another issue.
New York electric resource reliability standard plans on a loss of load expectation of one outage every ten years. Unsurprisingly, shows that the worst “dunkeflaute” gap for a ten-year period was shorter than the gap over a longer period. The philosophical safety problem that needs to be addressed is what timing horizon do you use for the worst-case planning scenario? Planning for only ten years means that during a one in fifteen years event the electric energy resources will not be enough to prevent a blackout. But how far out do you go. I believe that this is a tradeoff that inevitably ensures that there will be a blackout when a renewable energy resource lull inevitably exceeds the planning horizon because of their weather dependency.
And isn't the electrical grid like 18% of total world energy demands? Even if you got it to 50% - 9% total world energy demands, there's still a 91% shortfall in "green" energy.
For those interested in this aspect of green energy, Chris Bond has published an analysis of the prospects for net-zero in the sunshine state itself, California:
It's long and detailed - and looks at long term energy storage.
In short, the seasonal shortfalls with renewables cannot realistically be met by long term storage. So future California will be unable to avoid outages.
It probably needs its assumptions and methodology checked by someone who knows much more about this than I do!
I agree with your comments - indeed,if we were to install 10,000,000,000 x 5MW wind turbines, during Dunkleflaute, you get 0GW (not 50GW) and at those times (there are many), you need back up
I agree 100% with your post. Great way to show the problem. There is another issue.
New York electric resource reliability standard plans on a loss of load expectation of one outage every ten years. Unsurprisingly, shows that the worst “dunkeflaute” gap for a ten-year period was shorter than the gap over a longer period. The philosophical safety problem that needs to be addressed is what timing horizon do you use for the worst-case planning scenario? Planning for only ten years means that during a one in fifteen years event the electric energy resources will not be enough to prevent a blackout. But how far out do you go. I believe that this is a tradeoff that inevitably ensures that there will be a blackout when a renewable energy resource lull inevitably exceeds the planning horizon because of their weather dependency.
Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York Blog
And isn't the electrical grid like 18% of total world energy demands? Even if you got it to 50% - 9% total world energy demands, there's still a 91% shortfall in "green" energy.
For those interested in this aspect of green energy, Chris Bond has published an analysis of the prospects for net-zero in the sunshine state itself, California:
https://chrisbond.substack.com/p/california-reality
It's long and detailed - and looks at long term energy storage.
In short, the seasonal shortfalls with renewables cannot realistically be met by long term storage. So future California will be unable to avoid outages.
It probably needs its assumptions and methodology checked by someone who knows much more about this than I do!
Jaime, you can see NGESO historic fuel mix breakdown, including that measly storage here
https://www.nationalgrideso.com/data-portal/historic-generation-mix/historic_gb_generation_mix
I agree with your comments - indeed,if we were to install 10,000,000,000 x 5MW wind turbines, during Dunkleflaute, you get 0GW (not 50GW) and at those times (there are many), you need back up