Renewable energy sources – in particular solar and wind – are growing by leaps and bounds around the world, in great part because the price for them has been plummeting over the years. This has made renewables the lowest-cost source of electricity in many places.
The biggest downside to both solar and wind power is that they are intermittent: the sun only shines during the day and the wind doesn’t always blow. As a result, solar and wind power generally have to be supplemented by other generation sources, such as gas-fired generators. But in a number of places, this situation is changing.
A recent report finds that grouping wind, solar, and batteries together in appropriate locations can be more affordable than building fossil fuel power plants and can result in what is known as “firm power” – that is electricity 24 hours a day.
The idea is to load up some of the sunniest and windiest places on Earth with enough solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries to yield the ability to continuously generate electricity more cheaply than anything that has to burn fuel to do it.
A giant facility in India is coming online to do just that. China is building multiple systems on the Tibetan Plateau, where dry, cool, sunny weather is ideal for solar production and windy mountain ridges are great for wind turbines.
Falling prices on solar panels and on lithium-ion batteries have led to generation at half the price per megawatt-hour that gas-fired plants can offer, at least outside of the US, because our higher costs are grandfathered in in various ways. In the right locations, these systems can pump out enormous amounts of energy around the clock without consuming an ounce of fuel.
