Oil Bad Green Good - Electrical RealitiesFantome great perspective and take as always from a socio economic point of view. Anyways, doesnt it stick in your craw about that haughty guy who just charged up his EV for free? He is able to do so not only as a gift from the government but mainly because the grid has enough capacity to leak out his small amperage. As I've said before I travel between Kimberley and Nelson frequently and have only seen two cars filling up. In fact there are only three charging stations in the region. But I digress. According to the IEA, the world had generation capacity of 6.27 Terra Watts, that 6.17 million Mega watts. Alberta has about 11,000 MW of capacity. Of the total, 4.15 are fossil fuels, 1.0 of renewables. The greenies state that 27 percent of capacity is renewable but reality is 17 percent. In terms of actual demand coal, natgas and nuclear accounted for 68 percent with renewables at 11 percent indicating not all capacity was used. This is a key point. Now what happens in a green shift. Converting all ICES and 80 % of natgas would add another 5.6 TW of demand. Adding 5 TW of growth to 2040 brings total demand to 16.8 TW. Renewables would have to grow by about 14 TW or by 13 times. As I indicated above our grid is pretty stable and can handle the load of EVs and the excess energy on the grid for the most part is handled. In Alberta the grid operator load balances and dispatches energy efficiently resulting in stable prices. In the US there are no such practices and re renewables take precedence resulting in low low spot prices around 2 cents per kw hr. In Norway the price recently went to zero. Ontario on the other hand had the Hydro fiasco where the Corp was forced to take high renewable power prices. That said the real issue is when we have more renewable power than base load power. Brown outs occur when demand exceeds supply. This is physics which trumps green policy everytime. System wide outages occur when parts of the system fail which spread across the grid in cascading equipment failures. Simply put the best solar can do is a 50 percent load factor. In Canada there are a few areas with more than 2,000 hours of Sunshine per year ( from south of Regina to Cranbrook). As Marner or Fantome pointed out solar only works in the US SW, the middle east and perhaps northern Africa. Wind is more widespread and likely has more potential but again it is subject to mother nature. Some areas may have load factors above 75 percent but all areas have calming winds at night and all have calm periods. Recently the UK grid operator warned of outages due three calm days. In north America our peak demands occur in the dead of winter and in summer when green power may or may not be available. Finally a word on load balancing batteries. I looked at a number of large Australian wind farms. One project was 600 MW which is roughly half of the Site C project near Fort St John. It had a 600 MWHr battery. Sounds huge and it is. But it basically smoothed small bumps. It capacity is 600 MWHR. If it could the battery would be drained in an hour. To supply back up for three days they would need a 43,200 MWHR battery. Not very reassuring. I can see renewables installed in developing countries where infrastructure was lacking. I wouldn't want to put my money in the Congo for example. I can see between 30 and 50 percent of generating capacity going green over the next twenty years. That said it wont work in a completely deregulated environment as brownouts and outages will occur. I dont see heavy handed regulation but more like the FAA.