Date: 2017-07-19 11:46 am (UTC)
danieldwilliam: (Default)
From: [personal profile] danieldwilliam
The comments on the wind article are an interesting mix of people supplying useful information and people not really knowing enough to justify their access to a keyboard.

For example

"Is there any way those countries could co-operate to build the grid? They will never get it done."

"Um, yes, the EU's massive project to increase grid interconnection across the whole continent. Here are lots of links to the details of all of it."

Anyhow - we are going to spend the next 30 years building interconnectors I reckon - which is a bit awkward because I don't see them becoming cheaper in the same way as wind turbines, solar panels and batteries. We've been making power cables for a long time and unless we discover room tempreture superconductors that we can deploy in the next 10-15 years I don't see a radical breakthrough in material technology helping with the cables and sub-stations.

But also NB the trials of floating offshore wind turbines in Scotland by Statoil.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jun/27/hywind-project-scotland-worlds-first-floating-windfarm-norway

If successful it opens up lots of space in the Med and West of Shetland for offshore wind. Perhaps the Black Sea too.

It's good to see that fusion remains only 40 years away, for a while I was getting worried that it was going to move to being only 20 years away in the near future. I do genuinly wonder what market fusion reactors are going to be sold in to in 2050 given that, if I am right about renewables, by 2050 we'll be building little else but solar panels and windfarms and it will be cheaper than ever and if I'm wrong we'll have had to build all the fission reactors we can afford.

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