Quote:
Originally Posted by Torture
Renewables are not as intermittent as we tend to think.
Wind for example, blows in a specific area, but it tends to be blowing *to* somewhere. IE. if it's windy in Alberta, that wind moves on to Saskatchewan, so you if you have an integrated grid you can plan for that.
Intermittent energy from solar and wind can be stored in other forms than batteries as well. Things like Hydro are increasingly being thought of as a form of storage instead of as base load. Water can be pumped up to to the top of the reservoir while energy is abundant, and then released the water to generate energy.
Solar can be stored as heat in molten salts which allows you to collect the energy and store it for the day, and distribute it during the evening when the sun isn't shining but energy demands are still there.
To successfully meet climate goals we pretty much need to electrify everything, and generate clean energy. To do that we need to have storage to manage intermittency, but that isn't just batteries.
We also need to look at the grid as a whole to manage intermittency, not just individual states or provinces.
As for BC selling power to AB (and vice versa) - yes! That is something that we should consider. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be on either province's roadmap. I listened to a podcast with one of the heads of BC Hydro after their new plan and they blamed AB for not being interested in it, but it seemed to be like both provinces weren't really looking at it which is important.
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These are all good points I agree with, but the renewables are still subject to intermittency issues, and as of yet really only pumped hydro is a reliable storage medium. There's tons of interesting storage solutions still in development from solid based gravity mediums, heat storage in various materials, pumped air, flow batteries, etc. The aqueous iron battery installation in Minnesota announced today is very promising as it's finally low cost and has high energy potential.
Im'm sure you're aware of these things but for broader education, there's really two types of intermittency to overcome: diurnal (day/night discrepancies), and seasonal (summer vs winter). The storage mediums I mentioned above can solve the diurnal problem which almost completely solves the problem in areas where seasonal changes are minimal (Texas for example), but doesn't solve the big problem in places like Alberta where winter sun/wind is much lower than summer. We don't have any scalable non hydro solutions that are commercially available yet.