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Nathan Woodard's avatar

Great article! Thanks fort writing it!! I used to be an ardent--and somewhat naive--supporter of solar and wind energy production. In fact I devoted a major portion of my career to innovating in that space. It was around 2000 when solar industry insiders woke up to the criticality of grid scale energy storage. I was part a team that pioneered grid scale rapid response to short term fluctuations in supply vs demand, and we did so specifically to enable wind and solar. The work was fantastically interesting and my career went well for me personally. But while many have been gainfully employed and sometimes even enriched, and while many politicians and activists have been glorified, the tech companies and the investment community has thus far failed to provide solutions that will allow grid energy storage to keep up with the public and political enthusiasm for renewables. For me personally it has added up to a life lesson on some of the limits of democracy and how far removed policy makers can become when huge practical issues get sharply politicized. In the present pollical environment, climate activists have the upper hand and they are aggressively pushing politicians to enact policy decisions without including enough input from actual experts in energy production and distribution. (Anybody who scoffs at this remark probably needs to get outside their social and political comfort zone and do a little more digging.) Most of the people I talk to about wind and solar literally have no idea that energy storage is a factor and that the present grid infrastructure can only handle a small percentage of wind and solar given the existing storage facilities and technologies. Maybe some team at McKinsey has it all sorted, but it seems to me like the public and the politicians are ill informed as to the net environmental and geopolitical impact that will be inflicted on the world if we rapidly build out a sufficient battery storage infrastructure to catch up with the current rate of growth in so called sustainable sources. Speaking from my own decades long experience in this arena my own personal opinion is that the massive concentration of capital into wind and solar has been a terrible mistake and we should have focused a much bigger share of those resources into nuclear power. People who scoff at nuclear often assert we don't have the right technology yet, but the same criticism entirely applies to grid scale energy storage which may prove to be even more elusive that fusion. There are some very promising entrepreneurial efforts to revolutionize large scale battery storage, and I hope it works out-- but I doubt that we would have opted for the current path if we as a society had done a better job involving industry experts and analyzing the tradeoffs between renewables and nuclear.

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Randolph Carter's avatar

These issues of storage and consistent power generation are what have me freaked out about the electrification of everything (e.g. heavily subsidizing people to switch to induction cooktops, split units for heating/cooling/hot water, etc.). That power still has to come from somewhere, and when everything is taxing the electric grid, which is already stretched to the max in states like California... I just don't see a whole lot of good outcomes. Efficient appliances that don't work at peak hours because there's not enough juice are sort of an insult to the people relying on them for heat.

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