Solar power is great as long as the sun is shining. Wind's just fine until it's calm. If we're going to use renewable sources like these as the basis of our next-generation power grid, how will we handle the times when they aren't producing?
We need a way to store that energy, for a few hours to a few days, so that we can damp out the mismatched timing between generation and demand. Pumped storage is probably the best currently available technology for that.
Ontario's electricity grid has been in the news again lately. It seems some folks are confused about what, exactly, goes into their power bill and why they are paying 12 cents per kilowatt hour when the "market rate" is supposedly 3 cents.
I can't say I blame them- we have an alphabet soup of agencies in on this, and the electricity "market" is anything but. Let's try to clarify.
We've had a heat and drought wave in southern Ontario for the last few weeks. The grass goes "crunch" underfoot, there's been virtually no rain for a month, and the thermometer's been consistently in the high 20s to low 30s- and, with humidity at 70+ percent, it feels a lot hotter.
It's obviously quite tempting to crank up the air conditioner and pretend that it's nice and cool. The energy (and financial) cost of running that air conditioner, though, escalates much faster than you might expect.
There has been a lot of backlash lately whenever the idea of building a new power plant comes up. We're shooting ourselves in the foot, though, if we reject every proposal that comes along. If we insist on no nuclear, no coal, no natural gas, no wind, no solar, no large-scale biofuels and no more hydro dams, there simply aren't any sources of power left for us to run our society with.
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