This is the main reason why China is accelerating renewables. Renewables solves their energy sovereignty problem which they are very stressed about. If they decide to invade Taiwan, they have no easy solution to an oil blockade. They only have ~3 months of strategic reserves. They're fine on coal (albeit they can't really expand use that much, they can just keep it steady), it's oil that's the issue.
https://gjia.georgetown.edu/2023/03/22/chinas-economic-secur...
The other 4 reasons are smog over cities, growing political leverage of the domestic renewables industry, climate change, and the improving learning curve making it financially pragmatic.
I think this provides a framework for how to market renewables to a domestic conservative political audience. It's cheaper, yes, but primarily it's good for national security and sovereignty. It's even better for individual sovereignty if we're talking about individual household solar, whereas oil and gas makes the individual beholden to the state or corporations (or worse, a foreign hostile state).
> It's even better for individual sovereignty
Only if you are off-grid, otherwise without the grid you have no power unless you get a setup that uses an inverter that is of an entirely different class than the ones commonly used. And then you need a substantial amount of local storage as well and you're going to have an absolutely minimal energy budget in the winter.
50kWh of battery is quite cheap compared with a house and will keep you going a long time without grid power
A 50KWh capacity battery will last a very energy efficient house < 5 days.
For grid independence you need to have either multiple redundant sources of energy and a backup generator (which consumes a fossil fuels), an absolutely massive battery (far larger than is economically feasible) or a grid hookup.
I've reduced the energy consumption of our house about as far as it will go without seriously affecting quality of life, and yet it won't go down below 500 W draw on average, so about 10 KWh on a daily basis. On an annual basis we're 7.7MWh surplus but in winter we are net consumers. Starting March 1st we are in the plus on a daily basis and we could - if we had a battery, which we do not - be neutral. But we're still heating with gas and that leaves four months to cover or about 120 days.
During those 120 days we consume 4 times 350 KWh, so 1400 KWh or thereabouts and produce about 700 KWh with the biggest gap near the solstice in December (due to the very short days). It is simply not feasible to bridge that gap with batteries and we also consume about 450 cubic meters of gas per month in that period, which for a house this type and size is actually pretty good.
So I don't buy the 'personal autonomy' argument unless you want to cut your winter consumption to ~30% of your summer consumption, set your house to 14 degree room temperature (in many households that would be grounds for divorce) or get a 500 KWh battery system, which would set you back approximately $300K at the best prices that I can find today. I don't think that's worth it.
Depends where you live, some places have more consistent sun across the year. Regarding personal autonomy, I wouldn't treat it as this binary thing. If you're survivalist minded, solar is your only hope at any level of independence, even if it's not 24/7 autonomy.
> Depends where you live, some places have more consistent sun across the year.
Everything depends on where you live. But for any country more than a few degrees off the equator that's the reality.
> Regarding personal autonomy, I wouldn't treat it as this binary thing.
That's fair, but 'personal autonomy' for 70% of the year and utterly dependent on existing infrastructure and fossil fuels for the remainder is still bad. But better than 100% dependency, sure.
> If you're survivalist minded, solar is your only hope at any level of independence, even if it's not 24/7 autonomy.
Depends on where you live ;)
Seriously: I engage in engineering, not in satisfying paranoia and 'any level of independence' starts with ruthlessly curbing your energy budget below that which most Western countries' inhabitants would consider acceptable living standards. And even if I personally would be ok with that I don't see how I would make that decision for myself while at the same time not make that decision for those around me who depend on me for their needs. In a vacuum you can make that argument, but IRL people don't live in a vacuum.
How many people have their own oil pump in the back yard? And are self sufficient with food?
No man is an island.
In an extreme situation when you have no grid for a week then yes, having to slum it by only heating one room.
Every house having 50kwh would allow massive grid smoothing when wind and solar are fluctuating. Just one day of storage would allow a lot of arbitrage, but when power is cheap overnight and run solely off battery when it’s expensive.
I'd love to switch to a situation like that, tomorrow, please. But the reality is that unless such lack of comfort is shared people will simply not agree to it. It would be symbolic at best.
> A 50KWh capacity battery will last a very energy efficient house < 5 days.
With solar panels that can fill it up daily (eg. blackstart)?
In an off-grid situation you run the panels through a fairly straightforward battery charger, and you never let the battery be depleted all the way so a blackstart situation would normally not occur. That's an indication that something went terribly wrong in managing your battery, it likely would damage the battery beyond recovery.
I remember headline news when a village in my country was cut off for 36 hours. 5 days without grid is unthinkable.
In Canada, it didn't take more than a couple of hours before the fabric of society started to break down during the big power outage for the North-East of the North American continent. The grid was down for more than a week in some places and we were very fortunate to be mostly off-grid by then and to have two massive backup generators as well as a gas station full of fuel. If not for us being prepared the region where we lived would have been much harder affected. Strangely enough, us new immigrants to the region were better prepared for this than those that had lived there all of their lives, they just took the grid instability for granted. If that outage had happened in the dead of winter instead of in August many people would have died.
https://jacquesmattheij.com/a-world-without-power/
With the article about Europe, I'll note the average house here uses half the electricity of your very efficient Canadian house (probably more gas for heating though).
And it's in much of Europe where a village or a few villages being without power for a day or more is headline news.
e.g. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cek7jvnm2p9o
> With the article about Europe, I'll note the average house here uses half the electricity of your very efficient Canadian house (probably more gas for heating though).
No, we were way ahead of our efficient house here in Europe because we were able to design that efficiency right into the structure. That house sipped power and the heater ran off the damaged trees on the property that we cleaned out annually.
I kept pretty careful logs of consumption before pulling the trigger on going off-grid and it's interesting to see how the reduction in consumption factored as much into that as the increase in renewable energy. Once the windmill was added the generator basically never ran again.