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Originally Posted by Street Pharmacist
You're absolutely correct, but from what I understand it's more complicate than that.
Grid stabilization is more than just demand vs supply, but about having them match perfectly to prevent frequency irregularities which lead to power outs. Hydro is the cats meow, because you can just dial it up/down fairly easy. Large steam turbines take minutes to scale up/down and even gas peaker plants can take several seconds to a couple minutes to react. Batteries are instant and make the grid far more reliable and have less load shedding and loss.
Cost is really hard to compare. To attempt to have levelized costs you have look at solar plus storage vs "load" (Coal/Nuclear/etc) plus gas peaker. There's so many assumptions that go into that cost analysis that you can make arguments either way very easily. Cost for Solar Plus storage is only installation with very little ongoing costs. Costs for Nuclear for example is build/fuel/ongoing labour/maintenance/inspection/etc. Then if you amortize that over the life span you still don't get levelized costs because battery storage provides load balancing services that other load generation can't compare with (eg. needing to add gas peakers to balance the load).
Long story short, people much smarter than me can make both sides of the argument work. To my simple mind, Solar/Wind as load with some form of energy storage makes the most sense, but it's complex and we haven't solved long term storage we'd need in many parts of the world. There is however, an awful lot more room for solar/wind in current load generation before we have to have these problems solved.
Why can't 95% renewable be the goal? 90%? Seems more reasonable and you still can achieve the end goal of GHG emission reduction.
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There is a whole bunch to unload on this post. You've clearly done research and you are correct on many things but wrong on many more.
Frequency irregularities are solved simply with the use of synchronization relays, long story short they compare voltage levels and frequency of the supply generation to current grid status. If they arent equal or "synced", the generation will not be introduced to the grid.
You are correct that some gas generation takes a short amount of time to introduce to the grid, however it strongly depends on the type of generation. The more complex the natural gas generation (combined cycle and co gen specifically) the longer the start up time as there are more moving pieces.
I'll admit I do not have any stats to back up cost of battery storage in terms of normalizing pricing, but it currently isnt being done in Canada on a large scale. This could be due to a multitude of reasons and I would speculate battery cost and effectiveness in cold weather to be among them. You dont have to look further than EV mileage to see the effect cold weather has on batteries.
Load shedding isnt prevented by batteries at all. Load shedding is what a grid does to normalize frequency/voltage levels so that electrical devices at a consumer level can operate when the grid is strained. To put it in layman's terms, when a grid has a high demand to capacity ratio, frequency and/or voltage dips. When a grid cannot generate more, UVLS (under voltage load shedding) or under frequency protection are invoked. This means rolling brown outs and it hasn't happened in AB in a long long time.
Nuclear is a technology I could 100% back, solar and wind as a base generation I cant...yet. IMO the only time solar and wind will have a use is when we have affordable and reliable battery systems to store their energy so they can instead act as a reserve instead of a base. As of right now they simply arent effective enough to be done on a broad scale to reach our demand.
Green energy is directly tied to battery advancements, and that's why it isnt feasible right now.
The alternative is to leave this -40C icebox and live somewhere that we dont have to spend thousands on energy and instead move to a climate where humans were actually intended to flourish.