Europe's Blustery Weather Boosts Renewables to Record Highs

[OKIsItJustMe]

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608058/europes-blustery-weather-boosts-renewables-to-record-highs/

[font face=Serif][font size=5]Europe’s Blustery Weather Boosts Renewables to Record Highs[/font]

[font size=4]The U.K., Germany, and Denmark have seen clean energy blow past fossil fuels this month.[/font]

by Jamie Condliffe | June 8, 2017

[font size=3]The weather hasn't been what you’d call pleasant across Europe for the past week. Sure, the sun has shown its face a reasonable amount, but there have been rain showers and unusually high winds. Still, while that may have stopped al fresco dining in the north of Europe and ended cricket matches in England, it’s been a huge boon for the renewables sector.

The BBC reports that as a result of weather conditions on Wednesday, the U.K. generated more energy from renewables than gas and coal for the first time ever. The nation has invested heavily in wind power, which accounted for 10 percent of yesterday’s generation. Add in solar, hydro, and biomass, and 50.7 percent of demand was met by clean energy. Include nuclear, and the figure jumps to an impressive 72.1 percent.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg notes that renewables supplied two-thirds of Germany’s power needs at one point on Wednesday. (It set its own renewables record of 85 percent back in April.) And also in the small hours of yesterday, wind power accounted for 137 percent of national demand in Denmark.

That final point speaks to an issue facing renewables that all the wind turbines in the world won’t help us solve right now: when the wind blows, production is great, but when it stops, it’s non-existent. And because we currently lack the large-scale energy storage devices that could store electricity during times of overproduction, there’s still no way of smoothing out the intermittency. (Virtual power plants could help, but they’re still in their early days.)

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[msongs]

1. nuclear is not clean energy. it is the dirtiest of all. chernobyl & Fukushima, anyone? nt

[hunter]

2. Natural gas will be the end of us, not nuclear power.

"Natural" gas is our "Brawndo, it's got Electrolytes!"

There are more than enough gas "reserves" to destroy the this civilization and the natural environment as we know it.

"Fracked" gas is as bad as coal, contaminating ground water and the earth with toxins that have a "half-life" of FOREVER.

People can wave their arms all they like about large scale energy storage projects and "smart" grids, but giving away excess wind generated power, or even paying someone to take it, is not a sustainable business.

Solar and wind power backed up by nimble natural gas plants are not going to save the world.

The great horror of most anti-nuclear activism is that it turns people into unwitting shills for the gas industry.

I ignore gas industry shills, most especially those who claim gas is some kind of stepping stone to a clean energy future. It's not.

[FBaggins]

3. Don't be ridiculous

Chernobyl was the worst ever (likely by a couple orders of magnitude)... it killed thousands. Fukushima was the next-worst and will likely kill dozens of people over the coming decades, but probably hasn't killed anyone yet (from radiation that is).

Yet if you read OKIsItJustMe's post from earlier this week... you'll see that tens of thousands of people are killed by King Coal every year in the US alone.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1127&pid=110849

and endangers billions around the world through climate change