With the eyes of the world on the United Nations COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, strategies for decarbonizing energy infrastructure are a trending topic.
With the eyes of the world on the United Nations COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, strategies for decarbonizing energy infrastructure are a trending topic. Yet critics of renewables question the dependability of systems that rely on intermittent resources. A recent study led by researchers at the University of California, Irvine tackles the reliability question head-on.
In a paper published recently in Nature Communications, the authors, including experts from China’s Tsinghua University, the Carnegie Institution for Science and Caltech, said that most of the current electricity demand in advanced, industrialized nations can be met by some combination of wind and solar power. But that positive finding comes with the caveat that extra efforts are going to be necessary to completely satisfy the countries’ requirements.
Most reliable systems, which are dominated by wind power, are capable of meeting electricity requirements in the countries studied 72 to 91 percent of the time, even without energy storage, according to the study. With the addition of 12 hours of energy storage capacity, systems become dominated by solar power and can satisfy demand 83 to 94 percent of hours.
Read more at: University of California - Irvine
“Wind and solar could meet more than 80 percent of demand in many places without crazy amounts of storage or excess generating capacity, which is the critical point,” says Steve Davis, UCI professor of Earth system science, co-author of a recent study on zero carbon-emissions electricity generation in advanced countries. (Photo Credit: Steve Davis/UCI)
