One of the issues that people continually raise about renewable energy, particularly solar PV, is that it isn’t always generated when people most want to use it. This is true. But there are a number of responses. One is that a lot of it is nevertheless produced when people want it, and that is worth having. Another is that people (and businesses) can shift the time at which they want to use it by changing their habits and processes.
Indeed, some firms make a living by turning off the air conditioning in hotels, conference venues and the like and selling that reduction in demand to the electricity distributors instead of firing up another gas plant. A third is to use storage systems to hold the electricity until it is needed. A fourth is to reduce demand overall, a requirement that is something you can, and should, say in any discussion about energy usage.
Let’s go back to storage systems. The BBC News website had a story very recently headlined “Europe's biggest battery storage system switched on” at Cottingham in Yorkshire. The site uses Tesla technology and has capacity to store 196MWh, enough to power 300,000 homes for two hours.
I found the story on Twitter, and so not unnaturally there were a lot of people finding objections. It’s the wrong sort of battery, you should be using flow batteries. Batteries are only any good for storing electricity over a few hours, they’re useless when you want summer energy to be stored until winter. 300,000 homes for two hours isn’t much; you’d need 200 sites to cover the whole country. And so on.
And also, it being Twitter, there were as many people knocking down these objections. It’s been built, using known technology, without subsidy, and it will be useful. The summer/winter problem is a different one; this site will help supply the demand peak from 5pm to 7pm each day, without firing up a gas plant. 200 such sites? – why is that impossible?
A common thread from objectors is that renewables don’t instantly replace 100% of what we have now and that therefore it is not worth doing any of it. This brushes aside what it can achieve now. It’s like saying in the early 1900s that this new-fangled electricity is a load of rubbish and you’re going to stick with gas lights, thank you very much.
So what happens is that some people take up electricity and some stay with gas lights, at first, and over time the bugs get worked out of the electricity system and eventually everyone has electric lights. And then you find that electricity can do so much more than just lights. Gas-powered TVs and broadband routers, anyone?
Not everything has to be instantly 100% coverage to be useful. Every time you don’t have to turn on a gas plant to generate electricity is a win for the climate.
What’s different now from the early 1900s, and why we are pushing the change to Net Zero, is that the climate has given us a deadline.