"China's energy regulator has ordered 11 provinces to stop more than 100 coal-fired power projects, with a combined installed capacity of more than 100 gigawatts, its latest dramatic step to curb the use of fossil fuels in the world's top energy market."
"To put it in perspective, some 130 GW of additional solar and wind power will be installed by 2020"
Whoa, somebody's gonna need to be coming up soon with some serious energy storage systems!
The pollution gets pretty bloody bad .. last time I was in Beijing there was white haze everywhere like the famed London fog of the days of yore.
Maybe the CCP don't want to have their legitimacy questioned- pretty valid short or long-term objective.
Here they just shut down every one of the coal plants, double our electricity rates, and most of the pollution keeps pouring over from south of the border.
m objective here and everything stated above will thereafter be ignored
The Chinese recently invested enough in high volume manufacture of photovol taic cells to let them halve the unit cost, and push up production volume b y a factor of ten, more or less knocking the high volume German manfacturer s out of the market.
There's nothing obscure going on here - you may not have noticed it, but it has been mentioned here before.
The air-pollution from their coal-fired power plants has been particularly bad in recent months, as Spehro has mentioned - quite bad enough to get re ported in the Australian media, though the US media does tend to be more pa rochial, so you may not have been aware of the problem - and one can imagin e that they may have moved the renewable energy schedule forward a bit.
As Win says this does imply a requirement for more dispatchable power. The Three Gorges project did add a lot of hydroelectric capacity to the system, and that is eminently dispatchable. They might even add some pumping capac ity to make the river run backwards during sunny days.
We need to get going as well. While I appreciate the netmeter on my 10kW solar roof, allowing me to use the grid as a battery, I'm really not doing my part until I'm either providing my own storage or paying someone else to provide it. But right now I don't know of a service like that.
It would be hard to pump much water uphill across the dam unless the discharge were in a tidal region which I don't think it is. Once you stop letting the river flow past the dam the water level below the dam will recede very quickly.
Or you could just up your consumption when the solar is generating. Get a Tesla and charge it during the day. Or better, get your neighbors to buy Teslas and have them charge during the day.
There are such things as solar cooperatives that people sign onto for vario us reasons. The entire output goes back into the grid so if you buy enough shares that your grid contribution meets your night time energy usage then you are a net zero consumer. The coops are a business venture so they pay y ou some kind of dividend that you use to pay down your electric bill.
Rolling blackouts during the low production periods from renewables will solve the problem :-)
With frequent blackouts, individuals will have to buy UPSes and industrial sites have their own diesel generators for the blackouts. Thus the cost of providing the storage is shifted from the renewable energy producers to the consumers.
The question is, does this make sense in the national economy perspective ?
Running solar power during the day and hydroelectricity during the night is a good idea, but you have to upgrade the nominal hydroelectric peak power with twice peak power to effectively use the hydro and solar power symbiosis.
The question is, how much water lever variation is allowed during the day or during the week.
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