Getting To 100% Clean Energy

How can we achieve our quest for 100% clean energy?

Let’s start with the understanding that nuclear, while it’s very clean, is baseload, i.e., it can’t be ramped up to address the quite significantly changing loads that we experience through the course of a day. This means that eliminating fossil fuels requires energy sources that provide “dispatchable” (on-demand) power.  Insofar as solar and wind are intermittent by nature and cannot be controlled by grid operators, we normally think that this means large-scale energy storage, in the form of pumped hydro, batteries, etc.

What’s little recognized is the value of long-distance energy transmission.  If the wind isn’t blowing where you’re sitting right now, it certainly is somewhere else.

Here’s a solid article of the largest transmission projects under development.