The Challenges Behind Using Renewable Energy to Supply Electricity
Moksha D -
Hi everyone! Welcome back to my blog! This week I was focused on analyzing the challenges with the three types of renewable energy I studied last week.
The main issue that engineers are facing in harnessing renewable energy is that solar, hydro, and wind are all weather dependent. This creates an inconsistency in the ability to use it making it an unreliable way to provide power in its original form.
I was able to discuss why implementing renewable energy, while highly important, is very difficult to match consumers needs. If we solely go to renewable energy, in the night when there is no sun and hypothetically no wind, where will the electricity come from?
Hydro is highly dependent on the location that it is built in because of the upper and lower reservoir needed; flat land won’t work. I was able to see the initial costs of building infrastructures like the Hoover Dam and it can go as high as $800 million. The other issue is droughts which is what places like SRP see. Because of how dry Arizona is, a pumped hydro may not even have enough water.
In Arizona, there are many solar panels on residential homes and parking lots but solar panel farms need acres of land which can only be built outside the city. The problem with solar is that in the night or on a cloudy day when there is no sun, how can solar provide power? On a normal sunny day, the sun peaks at around 3pm/4pm but according to SRP data, the most load is needed at 5pm/6pm when people come home from work.
An interesting concept that engineers at SRP use is known as the “Duck Curve”. It shows how at 6pm when the solar energy is decreasing and demand for power is increasing, they must ramp up the supply of other forms of generation like coal to compensate.
Wind turbines are also both weather and location dependent. It may not always be windy and wind turbines cannot be built in cities because of the amount of space they take. For example, in Texas, the main cities are in the south and east but the wind turbines need to be in a location where there is actually wind which unfortunately is in the north and west.
Thank you for reading! In the next week, I will be proposing solutions to these inconsistencies in renewable energy.
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