simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Tuesday, 10-Sep-2024 03:43:28 JST
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Well, yes and no. You mentioned storage, then flipped to production. Renewables have no capacities for storage. And their electrcity generation is imbedded in a context of other factors like grid stability, prices at spot markets, etc. The commingling of topics was in your notice, not in mine
Turning "production processes to electric" is a pipe dream. The transformation of the chemical industry in DE alone would require us to put 500 TWh/a annually on top of the current annual consumption of 600 TWh of electricity, and that's only the chemical industry. And no, you cannot create that electricity to prices that keeps chemical production and products competitive. And a further no, as we didn't even mention how ore mining and refinement of minerals to produce the renewable stuff relies on fossil fuels in the mining industry and thus ads to fossil fuel consumption as to climate emissions.
Accorting to a McKinsey report (need to look up the link), the transformation towards electricity across all sectors till 2045 would require DE alone to pay about € 10 trillion total, that is € 500 billion annually. Nobody has that money.
I could open a different thread on why I see #peakrenewables but I leave that for another day. One example may suffice: We'll be lucky if in DE alone we can keep the power output of wind on-shore at current levels given the decommissioning of about half of the fleet from 2026 onwards due to end of life requirements. We're talking about 14,000 units that need to be replace *before* we can add more electricity generated from wind on-shore.
And yes, stuff like Tesla's Megapack seems feasible in decentralized, movable logistics environments as that of the military in war zones. Another field may be development aid and disaster mitigation. But here the consumption is relatively small and by no means on a scale that could serve as a base for industry-size production.