The Future of Renewable Energy Systems Worldwide Today

Introduction

Renewable generation is no longer the difficult part. Solar and wind are the cheapest new electricity in most of the world, and they are being installed faster than almost every forecast of the last twenty years predicted. The difficulty has moved to everything around them.

The grid is the bottleneck

Connection queues in several major markets now run to years, and the projects in them are frequently cheaper than the plants they would replace. Transmission takes a decade to permit and eighteen months to build, which means the permitting is the schedule.

Flexibility beats overbuilding

A system with a lot of variable generation needs demand that can move, not only storage that can hold. Electric vehicles, water heating, industrial process scheduling and heat pumps with thermal buffers are all shiftable by hours at little cost — and shifting is cheaper than storing.

The last ten per cent

Getting a grid to ninety per cent clean is largely a matter of building faster. The final tenth, covering long still periods in winter, is a different problem that hydrogen, long-duration storage or retained firm capacity may each solve — and pretending it is settled has been a persistent source of bad plans.

Where this is heading

Toward electrification of everything that can be electrified, a grid roughly twice its current size, and a planning system that has not yet been rebuilt to match. The engineering is largely understood; the institutions are the open question.