China could meet its energy needs by wind alone

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/09/china-energy-needs-wind/

and succeeded to meet their country's electricity demands by 2030. They would really be seen as leaders. How would Washington D.C. react if China took the lead in this?

Can we equate this to the 'space race' with the USSR? Shouldn't we push to beat China at this?

But because structuring a grid around wind only is no more practical than structuring a grid around any other single source of generation, they will have to build other types of generation. Their plans now include a lot of coal; let's hope that part is what changes.

Wind is not "on demand".

What if the grid produces less than what is needed?
What if the grid produced more than what is needed?

While China likely could generate a large amount of their power by wind (35%?) I always question an article that makes claims of "wind alone" without explaining the problem nobody in the world has yet figured out.... how to store terrawatts of power cheaply, safely, and reliably.

And while it is a factor, it isn't the central concern your post makes it out to be. That is a canard pushed by fossil fuel/nuclear proponents to denigrate the possibilities offered by both solar and wind.

What experience is showing us is that there are a variety of *generation and storage strategies* that will move into their appropriate niches as the demand for storage develops. The conceptual problem you present is one similar to that raised when someone says that 10,000 square miles of solar panels can provide all of our power. When looked at as a monolithic block like that the goal seems overwhelming and undesirable. However when placed in the context of other things related to land use like building roof area, roads or farms the nature of the challenge takes on a very different shade of complexity.

Even if generation is decentralized you still run the issue of at your decentralized location your demand > supply.

As an example. I put solar panel on my roof however at any particular second if demand > supply I can draw from the grid.
Sometimes supply > demand and I push power back to the grid "spin meter backwards".

However that system works because I can "always count on the grid" because it has other "on demand sources".

Now this isn't to say I can't use completely solar however I would need to build my system such that at the lowest peak output (Febuary) the system supplies 100% of my demand. The system would need to be twice as large as a grid tie system. I also need enough battery capacity to last 72 hours (to compensate for night and below average output days like raining or snowing). Depending on weather I might need 5-7 days of battery supply.

All that easily triples the cost making it massively more expensive than grid power.


Another way to look at it is. If I have $50,000 I could either
a) wire one home to be completely self sufficient.
b) meet power demand of 3 homes but still rely on the grid.

system b reduces greenhouse gases 3x as much for same amount of money however it requires at least some portion of the grid to either
a) be able to store massive amounts of power.
b) have an on-demand component.

Like most things it is a problem of doing the most good with limited resources.

Although constructing space-based solar facilities may be more expensive than constructing an Earth-based facilities, the resulting power would be almost constant.

Orbital solar has a lot of potential benefits.
One of which being that solar insolation is much higher in space where it is not affected by atmosphere, weather, and seasons.

And where did I say that we (or anyone) should depend any one energy source?

The present grid is a mixture several different types of generating facilities that each have different performance and operating characteristics. The renewable grid is going to be no different. The reason there is little storage built into the present grid isn't because the technology isn't there or because it can't be made economical, but because the entire grid is oriented around a form of stored energy - fossil fuels.

You seem to be claiming that electricity from a renewable grid is going to be 3X the cost of electricity now (your words are somewhat ambiguous). While that may be your perspective, it isn't a projection that is shared by any renewable energy analyst that I know of. Most scenarios envision a reduction in both direct energy costs to the consumer as well as substantial savings to society in the form of reduced external costs.

I have no idea what your point is with your "Another way to look at it" segment. As I said, the present grid operates exclusively on stored power; the challenge is to move to less and different methods of integrating stored energy. Your comment down thread regarding pumped hydro indicates you really aren't familiar with the components of the problem. Pumped hydro is an extremely mature technology, as is CAES. On the more local scale we have the move to PHEVs and the associated benefits of cheaper, better batteries due to mass production; V2G technology; and a huge used battery market that utilizes the capacity of batteries that are still good yet have been replaced for auto applications because they drop below the ability to store more than 80% of their original rated capacity.

If you built 10,000 square miles of solar in Nevada, localized weather conditions (ex. clouds) could present a real problem. If you distribute them all over the country (as any realistic scenario calls for) when one region is cloudy, other areas are likely to be clear, so things tend to balance out.

Similarly, if you had one huge wind farm in one location, it would be more subject to local weather conditions than numerous wind farms distributed over an area as large as China would be (especially if you included off-shore wind farms.)

However, better still is to use a diversified collection of technologies. Wind and solar (for example) tend to balance each other nicely (on clear still days, solar does better, on cloudy, stormy days, wind does better.)

(with or without wind)

the fact that electricity storage is uncommon,
(pumped hydro, where it exists)

should be a clue as to how difficult it is

as an experiment is power storage. It operated for some time but the upper reserve burst and the damage of millions of gallons pouring downward was massive.

Of course most damns can be converted to pumped hydro however that limits their usability by geography.