Author Topic: Looking forward: new technologies in the 2020’s  (Read 541 times)

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Offline Elderberry

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Looking forward: new technologies in the 2020’s
« on: January 04, 2021, 04:03:11 pm »
Climate ETC by Judith Curry 1/2/2021

Looking ahead towards new energy technologies, plus my own saga and rationale for transitioning my personal power generation and consumption.
Happy New Year everyone!  The theme I decided for my post to ring in the New Year is one of optimism re new technologies.

The basis for this post is an article by Eli Dourado that I spotted on twitter: Notes on technology for the 2020’s.  Will the new decade be the roaring 20’s or the boring 20’s?
Topics covered by Dourado include:

•   Biotech and health
•   Energy
•   Transportation
•   Space
•   Information technology

All are interesting and worth reading, here I focus on Energy.

Energy

The 2010s were the wind and solar decade. We observed stunning declines in the cost of both, although total deployment of wind and solar remains small—in 2019, wind and solar represented less than 9 percent of utility-scale electricity generation in the US. In the 2020s, cost declines will likely stall—wind and solar are already pretty cheap, so the declines of the past decade are not reproducible. Deployment, on the other hand, will accelerate.

Mass deployment of wind and solar will bring challenges. These sources are highly intermittent. When the wind suddenly stops blowing—which happens—we need a way to quickly make up the deficit. Each of the three electricity grids in the continental US—east, west, and Texas—has to remain in supply-demand balance every second of every day. We can use grid storage to smooth out some of the bumps, but storage remains expensive. To reach a grid powered entirely by today’s renewables, we would need storage at a price of $20 per kWh (with caveats).

More: https://judithcurry.com/2021/01/02/looking-forward-new-technologies-in-the-2020s/#more-26837