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Comment on The momentum of the solar energy transition

Right now Sweden and Norway have 118GWh of hydro storage and there is more in other EU countries. That alone is enough to power the EU for two weeks or so. But even that is not entirly needed as Europe is large and diverse enough geographically to have different weather in different countries. So power can still be moved. Even on the worst day of last year wind and solar were still able to produce 8.5% of the EUs electricity production so 37% of average levels.

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Eheran@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
At 2800 TWh of annual electricity demand/production in Europe, 118 GWh lasts for about 22 minutes. 2 weeks would take 1000x the storage capacity, about 100 TWh.

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- MrMakabar@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Sorry, I mean TWh and not GWh. For Norway it is 87TWh as here: energifaktanorge.no/en/…/kraftproduksjon/
  
  and for Sweden as well: researchgate.net/…/228782162_A_Nordic_energy_mark…
  
  So yes it is a thousand times more, my bad for mixing up units.
  
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  - Eheran@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Thank you. However, that is the yearly amount of energy. Not the maximum storage capacity at one point. Like (dis)charging a battery once <-> discharging it many times over the year. So over the whole year this massive storage was able to produce the energy needed in 2 weeks.
    
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    MrMakabar@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    It is absolutly the storage capacity at one point. . As in the first link:
    
    Norway has more than 1000 hydropower storage reservoirs with a total capacity of more than 87 TWh. The 30 largest reservoirs provide about half the storage capacity. Total reservoir capacity corresponds to 70 % of annual Norwegian electricity consumption.
    
    That is not that crazy. It just means that less then 10% of global hydro reservoir storage is in two European countries, with a lot of water and mountains. Hydro is by far the biggest storage capacity we have. To put it in the words of the iea and globally speaking:
    
    The reservoirs of all existing conventional hydropower plants combined can store a total of 1 500 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electrical energy in one full cycle – the equivalent of almost half of the European Union’s current annual electricity demand. This is about 170 times more energy than the global fleet of pumped storage hydropower plants can hold today – and almost 2 200 times more than all battery capacity, including electric vehicles.
    
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    Source: www.iea.org/reports/…/executive-summary
    
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