A Wind Power Crisis Is Holding Back the World’s Green Energy Goal
A Wind Power Crisis Is Holding Back the World’s Green Energy Goal
While solar deployment is accelerating, bottlenecks in the wind industry are jeopardizing the chance to meet a global target to triple renewable capacity by 2030.
While wind is more expensive than solar, and has issues highlighted in article, the higher capacity factors, and production outside of midday, means less battery capacity is needed to serve renewables, and batteries get charged more often.
A key to bringing down transmission costs for wind, especially offshore where transmission is the highest cost component, is hydrogen production. Picking up H2, or refueling, by trucks and ships can provide cheaper energy than transmission lines. Pipelines are even cheaper with enough volume, and double as storage.
The issue with hydrogen is that is diffuses and leaks straight trough metal pipes, and makes the metal brittle in the process. But... that property could also be used to create super dense storage, by intentionally diffusing it into something like aluminium
Just a reminder, hydrogen power is a meme sponsored nearly exclusively by the oil industry to divert funds away from actual green energy.
Green H2 does not benefit oil industry at all. It is only basis for a H2 economy because such an economy has to be 100% clean (FF derived H2 has less net energy content than original FF), and the essential rationale for an H2 economy is one where enough renewables to provide 100% of electricity every day needs to overproduce on most days, and H2 electrolysis is an automated way of providing transportable/exportable fuel that converts to electricity at high enough efficiency. The transportation cost advantage of H2 over electric transmission is enough to overcome the efficiency loss of creating it when the electric energy is cheap enough. 2-4c/kwh is enough for cheaper energy delivery by H2.
While Toyota has made great research/development in fuel cells, I agree that they have had a “don't buy an EV until you see our next model of the Mirai”, and oil companies bs about “blue H2” potential as path to fish for more subsidies, the anti-H2 fan boys are actually EV/battery investors. H2 economy requires batteries, and does have vehicle applications, but the main reason for it is that it is only path to 100% renewable energy.
The good match for wind, and offshore wind especially, is that many places achieve full electric demand coverage from solar alone on some days. On those days, adding batteries with more solar could achieve solar coverage over 24 hours. If it is windy at the same time, no wind energy would get sold those days, and then no additional renewables would be economic in that region, and higher demand days would not get covered by renewables. H2 is path for, wind especially, to sell/monetize all of their energy produced, but also bypass, for all renewables, grid transmission bottlenecks that monopolies don't mind being bottlenecks if it increases their discretionary power in providing energy permission.