Mini-grids may be the part the EU is missing. Selling your surplus ev power to grid is a huge waste, charging your neighbours car is a better use.
You will only need enough storage to cover 12-24 hours to reduce that a lot: Much of the surplus power can be put into vehicles when they're resting at home overnight, or for evening and next morning peak.
For the rest, well, so what? Temporary "oversupply" on days when there's lots of sun and no vehicle to charge up is not the worst problem to have - it won't kill anyone. The worst that you can say about it is that it's a misallocation of resources to sometimes have the power supply that you can't use or sell. But solar panels and batteries are becoming cheap. So the upside of having occasional surplus remains, the downside diminishes.
So you need to store energy for more than a few hours or generate it from something else.
You then have the choice to use batteries(costly for megwatts as of now), things like hydrostorage, fossil fuels(gas/coal/oil) or hydrogen generated from renewable sources.
If you need big energy storages anyway, it makes more sense that communities pool their money together and invest in something like hydrostorage, but then you need a grid to connect the communities and if you do that, you might as well connect everything in the country so the grid is better at balancing.
So they have to buy some 30% more panels.
In germany a week long dukelflaute occurs every 2 years.
However when talking about rural communities that might not have power at all, or run a diesel generator in the evenings, that 95% from clean sources is a good start.
Having most of the electrical grid already it makes no sense to scale it back or not connect the few not connected communities
I'm not arguing against renewable I'm arguing against the idea that in most of europe it would be better to use small grids instead of an european wide big grid.
Hydrostorage is cheap if it provides enough energy for more than one small community, having the ability to balance energy production and needs across europe is easier than being at the mercy of local weather.
A good example for that is austria, where the grid has a problem where a better connection between east and west is not finished/buid because of discussions about environmental impact.
This leads to overproduction in one place which can't be transferred to places that need electricity.
I’m sorry, we’re all out of solar. Perhaps you can have no wind instead.
In germany a week long dukelflaute occurs every 2 years.
You don't need 30% more panels, you need to store energy for the all usage for about a week.
Yes, you need some redundant power supply. We should probably be investing more on research about synthetic fuels than we are right now (and shelf-stable flow batteries; hydrogen won't cut it in a micro-scale, even though it's great for national grids), but for a long time everybody will still use fossil fuels for that.
It's not a huge problem right now.
Electricity is fungible (ignoring transmission losses), so what's the difference?
That’s interesting, I had always assumed it would be far higher. Could I trouble you for a source?
That can't be, your panel is charging up your neighbor's car in exactly the same way independently of you being connected to outside of your neighborhood.