One guy simulated Australia's electrical grid for 3 years to show that the entire grid could run off of >98% renewable energy using the installed renewables with just a small amount of storage (e.g. 5 hours of average demand, ~10% of demand over the entire period).
To me this indicates that in many energy markets where renewables are sufficiently built out, the only factor for why we aren't using them more is the storage capacity and grid infrastructure to handle their variability -- and instead just running stable but dirty energy systems.
There are a lot of cool mechanical grid systems like gravity batteries (e.g. weights on a pulley system) [2] or compressed or liquid air storage systems [3] which provide cheaper storage at higher capacities and durations than electric batteries
It makes intuitive sense to me that a small amount of storage would make a big difference. Outside of peak use there has to be a huge amount of potential effect that never gets generated because lack of demand at that time.
Yeah, this matches what I've been thinking too - we're way closer to a high-renewables grid than people realize, but the bottleneck isn't generation anymore, it's storage and infrastructure
To me this indicates that in many energy markets where renewables are sufficiently built out, the only factor for why we aren't using them more is the storage capacity and grid infrastructure to handle their variability -- and instead just running stable but dirty energy systems.
There are a lot of cool mechanical grid systems like gravity batteries (e.g. weights on a pulley system) [2] or compressed or liquid air storage systems [3] which provide cheaper storage at higher capacities and durations than electric batteries
1. https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewable-gr... 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trA5s2iGj2A 3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjERw-Ol-_s