Comment on The momentum of the solar energy transition

• 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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      • Eheran@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        So that are the numbers for dams (since pumped storage is extra and much smaller). That is not (electrically) rechargable storage. It is storage, but bound to the influx of water and with many constraints about how much water can be released at what point, how much it has to have at least or at most at which point in year to prevent floods or droughts etc. That is not the kind of storage we need for solar and wind. And while the storage capacity is high, the available power output is not. Since they maximum anyone would install is going to be correlated to the influx of water, not to the fastest possible draining of the reservoir - which nobody would ever want to do.

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