When you have 50% of your electricity made using hydro-power, it's really easy to integrate as much renewable energy as you'd like. This is not even the best story, there are countries with close to 100% clean electricity, like Norway or Austria. It just doesn't scale that well for large countries where hydro can't amount to more than 10-20%.
South Australia has sourced 71.5% of its electricity from wind and solar over the last 12 months. It was 86.9% in October of this year. And its main transmission company is forecasting it will be 100% by 2026/27 [1]
To be absolutely clear, the percentages above are wind and solar only. They don't include hydro of which SA has only one small generator (3MW), that is situated in the main city's gravity-fed supply pipes. [2]
It's relatively easy to generate that amount, especially when you can easily import 20% of your power(very dirty coal power), and also run gas turbines for another 40%, like it is at this very moment https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/AU-SA
When you're talking about changing the US, it couldn't just import 100GW, Canada and Mexico couldn't provide that much, even if they were clean energy. There is just a difference between providing for one small region vs a continent. Also, Uruguay has huge neighbors, they could easily import-export clean energy from them (they are all hydro-centric).
But yeah, I will see the US going to 70% pretty soon, considering where panel prices are. The one big thing missing is the low cost to install on rooftops. In the US is costs at least 3 dollars per watt to install panels, whereas in the Eu or Australia it's under 1 dollar. The panels themselves can be bought for 15-20 *cents* per watt, so there is a lot of room for improvement. Rooftop solar in the US is a big scam at the moment, they are fleecing the consumers. On the other hand, utility size in the US is cheap, so they will cover the gap.
I am talking for hours when there isn't much renewables. If you set the timeline to 24 hours and look at the hours, you have periods with 55% gas and also 20% imports. You can assume imports are dirty coal, because that is most of Australia.
I've seen others point out that it's the average that matters for emissions and that was what the other commenter was posting. That makes sense to me, the peak usage only matters for cost reasons, and apparently gas turbines are really cheap.
There's no reason to speculate, much less pronounce the transition impossible. Smart people have down the math.
Transitioning the US to 100% clean power would cost - at most - $5.7 trillion.
We spent $8 trillion fucking up the middle east for oil.
Think about that - take all the time you need. Because if you still think this is about hydro access, and not leadership, you're holding up the change that is necessary.
> Because if you still think this is about hydro access, and not leadership
I looked up the McKenzie report[1] where I think the 5.7 trillion comes from. In short, the renewable energy would be 1.5 trillion, and batteries 2.5 trillion (transmission is the rest).
If you have 50% hydro, then you don't need batteries, so the cost for the US would drop by 2.5trillion. Having hydro is a big reason why some countries can do it easier than others. It's not a white and black situation, after-all, the US is already investing a lot in renewable energy.
Second, the report says it provisioned for 900 "gigawatts" of batteries. If they mean GW rather than GWh (Which I think they do), that is not nearly enough, that is just 2000 GWh at today's prices. The US needs 500GWh on average each hour, so you only get batteries for 4 hours. You need to either build much more PV, or buy many more batteries. Also, 2000GWh is about 2 years worth of current global battery manufacturing. It's just not the same building out a small country or a large country electrical grid.
That being said, it will happen, we'll soon switch to PV production, and it will happen faster than people think. It will be a disruption previously only seen in software. By 2030 we'll probably be pretty much powered by PV panels.
I'd like to see some specifics in where you get the $5.7 trillion.
More specifically how was the problem of intermittent power solved? I'm not aware of any grid-scale solution to this problem unless you include vast amounts of hydro to provide power when there is no wind or no sun or both.
