First, thanks for standing up to MTR and big coal, and hello to old buddy Roselle.

then you tell big coal they don't have to worry about backup for wind in amurka. existing plant provides all the backup necessary for a decade or more. It will take some 6X the current wind installations, roughly 300,000MW, to reach 20% of demand. By the time that figure is reached, all the aspects of sustainable generation and a smart grid will be in place.

Wind does not need to be backed up, because it is not the sole generating source.

Pumped hydro, especially for existing dams, will certainly be part of the mix.

the backup argument is a straw dog used by the conventional poison industry to obfuscate the viability of renewable resources. The real problem is the lack of wisdom of the amurkan people, who truly can't see straight.

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin

I haven't read of a programmatic Swiss-German cooperation yet, but I am sceptical. Most of the wind power installed in Germany is in the north, and the north-south power lines are at the capacity limit during high wind. There is, however, a well-known wind-hydro cooperation between Denmark on one hand and Sweden and Norway on the other hand.

Now, "consistent" when applied to wind power is a weasel word that obfuscates multiple concepts, so let me give some arguments:

1. Wind power output fluctuates due to changing weather (intermittency). But normal basload (nuclear, partly coal) fluctuates, too: shutdowns for refuelling, maintenance, or accidents and incidents. But does it matter? No, other things matter.

2. One thing that matters is reliability: success in delivering the power you promise. This is not the same as intermittency: it concerns only the unforeseen part of it. For conventional baseload, reliability depends on the number and duration of accidents and incidents. For wind power, this largely depends on the difference between predicted and actual power output. There is such a thing as weather forecast, after all. You can check and compare actual forecasts and power outputs for wind and solar in Germany on the tracking page of the European Energy Exchange, here.

3. Another thing that matters is meeting demand. None of the baseload plants, nor wind and solar, are capable of meeting demand on their own. Conventional baseload plants give a constant power most of the time, whereas demand has daily, weekly and annual fluctuations; and their shutdowns, due to their sizes, call for quick replacement on a large magnitude. Wind and solar (when those feeding into the same grid are taken together) show slower and more continuous fluctuations, but not by the same curve as demand. So, on their own, all of these need backup from variable power (usually hydro and gas, but also oil and some coal). For example, France manages to have a high share for nuclear by exporting a variable part of it, in effect using Italian and Spanish theermal power plants for balancing.

4. Note that if you put wind and solar together, there is a greater correlation with demand: often the wind blows heavier when the Sun is obscured, wind is strongest sometime between fall and spring while solar in the summer, and solar's midday peak and terminator winds mean that there is some mapping to the daily power demand curve, too.

5. Improving the grid (which is advisable anyway) can enable the export of wind power from regions under a storm front to ones with no wind, thus the random part of the variability can be reduced over a larger area.

With all that said, a 100% renewables or even a 40% renewables supplied USA would probably require major efforts to adapt and prop up balancing capacity. However, the situation with wind in the power mix is not fundamentally different from one with coal and nuclear as baseload, and, as Crazy Horse said, even 20% wind is still far away today.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

No need to go to Germany to find out how pumped hydro works. Just take a trip to the border to Virginia.

Bath County Pumped Storage Station - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Bath County Pumped Storage Station is a pumped storage hydroelectric power plant with a generation capacity of 3,003 MW ^[1] The station is located in the northern corner of Bath County, Virginia, on the southeast side of the Eastern Continental Divide, which forms this section of the border between Virginia and West Virginia. The station consists of two reservoirs separated by about 1,260 feet (380 m) in elevation.

It cost $1.6 billion,^[2] and was constructed with 2,100 megawatts (MW) capacity.^[3] In 2004 upgrades started, increasing power generation to 510MW and pumping power to 480MW per turbine.^[4] Bath County Station is jointly owned by Dominion Generation (60%) and the Allegheny Power System (40%), and managed by Dominion. It went into operation in 1985 and is still the largest-capacity pumped-storage power station in the world.^[5]

A vote for PES is a vote for EPP! A vote for EPP is a vote for PES! Support the coalition, vote EPP-PES in 2009!

I found the likely source of what you heard bout a Swiss-German wind-hydro cooperation: a Swiss parliamentary study (sorry link in German) on what to replace nuclear capacity with (Switzerland exits nuclear power, too). The study from this April argues that Switzerland is not well suited for wind power due to siting restrictions, but the rest of Europe has more than enough potential while Switzerland has hydro potential, so it would be best for Switzerland to 'serve' its neighbours with balancing power.

The article says that currently, Switzerland has 13.3 GW in hydro capacity, of which 1.7 GW is pumped hydro; and the study predicts the addition of 6 GW of power production capacity and 4 GW of pumped hydro capacity.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

Subthread now pasted into Mentatmark's diary Hobet Mine Shutdown, a Photo Diary.

Continue comments there?