Days before President Donald Trump returned to the Oval Office and took actions to stall the transition to clean energy, a disaster unfolded on the other side of the country that may have an outsize effect on the pace of the transition.
A fire broke out last Thursday at the Moss Landing Energy Storage Facility in California, one of the largest battery energy storage systems in the world. The fire raged through the weekend, forcing local officials to evacuate nearby homes and close roads.
Battery storage is an essential part of the transition away from fossil fuels. It works in tandem with solar and wind power to provide electricity during periods when the renewable resources aren’t available. But lithium-ion batteries, the most common technology used in storage systems, are flammable. And if they catch fire, it can be difficult to extinguish.
Last week’s fire is the latest and largest of several at the Moss Landing site in recent years, and I expect that it will become the main example opponents of carbon-free electricity use to try to stop battery development in other places.
But you always have a combination of several renewable sources which can power these countries.
Yeah, i know. Time will tell.
Sorry but that is just not true. The growth of solar has almost been logarithmic and the installed capacity was almost non-existent two decades ago. That just doesn’t compare to the snails pace of nuclear.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics
Also, it’s not about people, but money. Every euro spent on some tech bro nuclear startup could be used to install real capacity instead.
Yeah, theoretically true, but what distances are we talking about? To get electricity from the suburbs in the city center should be trivial. It gets more difficult if we have to cross countries, but high voltage DC solves that issue pretty well. We could power europe from solar installed in the Sahara ^^