Energy Report — RethinkX

Authored by rethinkx.com and submitted by MesterenR
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It is both physically possible and economically affordable to meet 100% of electricity demand with the combination of solar, wind, and batteries (SWB) by 2030 across the entire continental United States as well as the overwhelming majority of other populated regions of the world.

The Clean Energy U-Curve captures the tradeoff relationship between electricity generation and energy storage, and is a valuable tool for both understanding how 100% SWB is achievable as well as identifying the optimal mix of generation and storage capacity in any given region.

Lowest cost 100% SWB systems will typically require just 35-90 average demand hours of battery energy storage, depending on regional climate and geography.

100% SWB will provide the cheapest possible electricity system by 2030 – far less expensive than new conventional power plants, and in many cases less expensive than continuing to operate existing coal, gas, or nuclear power plants.

While both solar power and wind power are necessary, these generation technologies are not equal because solar is becoming cheaper more quickly. The lowest cost 100% SWB systems will comprise up to 10x more solar than wind in most locations.

SWB will not merely replace conventional power generation technologies as a proportional 1-to-1 substitution, but will instead create a much larger electricity system based on an entirely new architecture that operates according to a different set of rules and metrics.

Just as the Internet disrupted many incumbent industries but facilitated the emergence of many more – and created trillions of dollars of new value – by reducing the marginal cost of information to near zero, the SWB disruption will have a similar impact by reducing the marginal cost of energy to near-zero for a substantial portion of the year.

100% SWB systems will produce a very large amount of surplus power output, or Clean Energy Super Power, on most days of the year. In California, for example, super power from the lowest cost SWB system combination of SWB of 309 terawatt-hours is greater than the state’s total existing electricity demand of 285 terawatt-hours.

L_Feuerbach on October 27th, 2020 at 14:50 UTC »

An Australian company is about to build the world's largest solar farm in the Australian desert, and sell the energy to... Singapore. Whilst the conservative government does all in its power to retain fossil fuel's foothold. You can't make this shit up.

bi0nic_de on October 27th, 2020 at 14:15 UTC »

For homes it might be another story. We just installed solar panels on our home (10 kW) and our setup is battery ready, but we did not install a battery because the available batteries have an expected live span lower the the time to pay it off. We wait for better batteries.

adam_dorr on October 27th, 2020 at 14:08 UTC »

You rang?

I'm one of the authors of this new report, feel free to AMA!

It just launched today, so bear with me as I may be a bit slow to respond.

Edit: thanks everyone, I can't keep up with the individual questions and I have to step away from the keyboard for a while, but I will add the answers to some FAQs that multiple comments are asking to this post as soon as I can!