future clean tech

Yesterday I wrote about an email exchange I had with a friend of mine back in Sydney about global warming science. Ultimately, he agreed that it would be prudent to stop burning fossil fuels, if only because the particulate matter they leave in the atmosphere is self-evidently harmful to human health. I find that there is usually common ground with even the most hardened climate skeptics (which my friend insists he is not, as he believes that “the climate is changing, but it is natural.”)

The conversation turned to the challenges facing clean energy in replacing energy from fossil fuels. He wrote:

The problem is that at the moment we don’t have an energy source which is as efficient and as reliable as coal for base-load power, i.e. power for industrial use.

Solar, hydro, nuclear are all fine for residences, but none of them will be able to replace coal at the industry level. You would need to cover the entire state of NSW in solar panels in order to supply enough energy to run our industries.

My reply:

I don’t agree with you about base load. I don’t know why this myth persists. It is true that you can simply keep feeding coal or gas into a traditional plant and keep it running at all times, but there are loads of ways to mitigate renewable intermittency.

One is by spreading the energy receptors across a broad footprint. A recent study showed that Europe could be fully powered just by wind, without any additional energy sources, because when it’s not blowing in Sweden it is blowing elsewhere. People with the training and disposition of actuaries are able to work these kinds of things out to a high degree of accuracy. We even know what percentage of the year a certain site gets wind – with astonishing levels of accuracy – even though we don’t know precisely when the wind will blow.

And then of course you have tidal, which is nascent but does not suffer from any intermittency; geothermal which is constant; and you can augment any of the intermittent sources with other intermittent sources. Wind by itself would do just fine if you located it over a broad area, as I’ve mentioned, and you could always have backup coal plants to fire up when needed; but you could easily have a 100% renewable grid by using an appropriate mix of solar, wind, tidal and geothermal.

And then you have additional measures like demand response and load shedding to manage demand; energy storage using large battery banks… the possibilities are endless.