I thought with the explosion of electric power and windmills and the electric vehicle boom, fossil fuels would not be required…
Yet, a lot of countries still generate coal and other fossil fuels, is it because there is still filthy amounts of profit there to be made? Maybe they are just so used to it they don’t wanna swap to another resource?
I thought with Solar panels being massively produced, it would sell like hot cakes and you’re literally having the power of the sun in your hand.
Yeah, people are working on it.
The EIA estimates that there’s about 30 GW of battery capacity in the U.S., mostly in storage systems that are designed to store about 1-4 hours worth.
That’s in comparison to 1,200 GW of generation capacity, or 400 times as much as there is storage.
It’s coming along, but the orders of magnitude difference between real-time supply and demand and our capacity for shifting some of the power just a few hours isn’t quite ready for load balancing across a whole 24 hour day, much less for days-long weather patterns or even seasonality across the year. We’re probably gonna need to see another few years of exponential growth before it starts actually making a big impact to generation activity.