Proposed by who? The Sierra Club?
It's still far less efficient that fossil fuels, harder to store, and more expensive to collect.
This has "rolling blackouts" written all over it.
It's still far less efficient that fossil fuels, harder to store, and more expensive to collect.
This has "rolling blackouts" written all over it.
sun -> plants -> fossil fuels -> extraction -> burning -> electricity
-> take 500 million years to make, burn it all in 300 years
step that seems to be missed by the solar isn't efficient enough club.
Fossil fuel EROI is falling all the time, and renewables are creeping up.
If they did mean EROI, then I'm not sure that's the measure we should be using. It specifically ignores waste products: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_inve...
Which makes it not so good when thinking about global warming and public health impacts, things the CPUC takes into account when setting policy.
But even if we just use that, it appears that they're wrong about the EROI of electricity generation. Per Scientific American, the EROI of natural gas, the main competitor in California, is 7. Photovoltaic is 6 (and, as you say climbing), wind is 20, and hydroelectric is 40+: https://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v308/n4/bo...
But even if they were right and the EROI of renewables were "far less efficient", I still don't see how that leads to rolling blackouts.
Decentralized generation with local storage is a great way to prevent this kind of blackmail from ever happening again.
> change the way it supplies power when demand peaks. Instead of relying on electricity from three gas-fired plants run by Calpine Corp., PG&E will have to use batteries or other non-fossil fuel resources to keep the lights on in the most-populated U.S. state. The shift is possible in California partly because there’s a surplus of solar power,
IDK where they get there's a surplus, there's enough that it makes the "peakers" sit idle enough of the time they're not economically feasible to operate without a guaranteed payday.
Honestly, I could be wrong since the only information I have on the subject is this article which doesn't support the claim they're making. I suppose if you counted the plants that have to generate a certain amount of power + solar and wind at its peak then maybe there's a surplus in there somewhere, dunno?