“A combination of solar and wind energy with storage, a flexible hydrogen system, flexible electricity demand and residual load power plants will be necessary for a climate-friendly and reliable electricity supply,” the academies said.
Well yes. The only requirement is that supply ~= demand.
What I wonder about is: there’s no electrolytic hydrogen production, beyond lab tests. It’s been the big solution for energy storage for decades now, used in plenty of simulations such as this one. What’s going on?
It’s a bit pointless until grids have a significant surplus of renewable energy and those few countries are rightly turning to batteries first.
Even if electrolysis remains very inefficient, if countries are producing huge surpluses of renewable energy (particularly solar during the day) it might not matter.
Well, demand is low, supply is little and inefficiency in production is high. With that said, EUs fit for 55 will soon provide plenty of solar power, so summer days will see practically limitless electricity. At least enough to brute force the inefficiencies. maybe then.