Integrating More Solar and Wind Will Eventually Require Large-Scale Energy Storage Solutions
Guest blogger Cameron Atwood sent me this graph showing the increase in the use of solar and wind energy from 2005 to 2012. Impressive stuff. Here in the U.S., our grid-mix is currently comprised of more than 4% wind and about 1% solar – both of which are rising steadily.
Of course, due to the variable nature of these resources, we’ll eventually need a significant amount of energy storage, whether it’s in the form of advanced batteries, compressed air, hydrogen, ammonia, synthetic fuels, flywheels, pumped hydro, advanced rail, etc. Insofar as this subject is bound to become important, our list of clean energy investment opportunities contemplate several of these various forms of energy storage.
Craig,
For the first 11 months of 2013, solar energy made up ~0.229% of the grid energy in the U.S., while wind achieved ~4.15%. The data for December has not been released, but it will likely have the ~650 GWh of energy produced by solar and ~15.5 TWh of energy produced by wind,
So by the end of 2013, we should have seen ~4.18% of our grid energy from wind, and 0.226% from solar.
Just keeping it real.
The most alarming stat that I can offer is that wind energy only grew by 1.1 GW of installed capacity in 2013, 8% of the installed capacity in 2012. This happened because no-one has yet invested in the plausible grid-scale variable energy integration technologies out there (obviously including WindFuels), and the introduction of so much variable wind energy has saturated market demand for wind. We predicted this would happen as early as 2007, and developed a market viable solution… but until it’s followed through on, we are limited to wind energy – which is still growing 9X faster than solar, but it’s now growing VERY SLOWLY.