- embrace North Africa, admitting them as member states, and doing massive solar there, and doing massive grid expansion to carry it north. And then in top of that, will their way to sufficient storage like the rest of us.
EU does have trouble with solar seasonality, but wind is seasonally anti-correlated with solar, and the geospatial correlation between different wind turbines drops off more than linearly with distance, and the EU covers a very large land mass as-is. You can also over-build solar inside Europe to have reasonable collection during winter.
I also see no reason to admit North African states into the EU before an agreement can be reached about transporting solar. The geopolitical risks have always been about other states severing the link during a conflict with you, and less about the parties to the deal reneging. So whether Morocco or Algeria is part of the EU is quite immaterial to the risk profile.
This kind of thing really does need simulation modelling to be reasoned about properly. The one thing I am confident in saying is that these single sentence just-so stories about what is and isn't a good idea are going to be wrong, because the fundamental principle is statistical diversification, which needs to be approached through simulation rather than through words.
It's helpful to have two flavors of storage; one short term and efficient (batteries), one long term with low capex (hydrogen, thermal). The last is the most undeveloped but there are promising ideas.
I put some numbers into this, and the required power for long term storage is significantly lower than I'd have expected.
This was giving me for Germany (assuming 80GW of constant demand) under 50GW of required hydrogen turbine power (35GW of gas turbines are already installed, but only a fraction H2 ready).
Overprovisioning (wind/solar) is suprisingly high, with 180GW of wind and 440GW of solar. Currently installed capacity for those is about 30% of that.
Short-term storage capacity is a really big gap though (the model suggests 750GWh, and currently there's <30GWh installed).
In conclusion: Under pessimistic simplifications, Germany is at about 30% progress toward fully renewable electricity (but battery capacity is lagging behind).
Assuming wind/solar buildout continues at rates comparable to the last decade, this would mean zero-emission electricity in ~35 years. Could be worse. But I'm personally bracing for 2-4°C of warming, and don't think european glaciers will survive the next century...
The amount of long term storage (and the duration) depends on the balance between wind and PV.
If wind and PV have similar levelized cost of energy (LCoE), then the solution will use the lack of correlation between the two to avoid much storage. In this case, long term storage is over period of the variability of wind, which might be weeks.
But if PV is significantly cheaper than wind -- and this is where trends are going -- then long term storage becomes more for seasonal leveling, at least at high latitudes.
There's still a large place for short term storage, and economics is still strongly affected by the cost of that storage. So it's great news batteries have become so cheap to produce.
V2G can provide the short-term capacity. If one allocates e.g. 40 kWh from their battery to V2G, each million electric cars can add 40GWh of grid tied battery storage. If you pay people fairly, it will happen. There are more than 4 million electric cars in the EU already...
In Austria at least you cannot even charge your car with properly priced electricity unless you have your own outlet. At some chargers it is more expensive to charge through the night (because of blocking fees over 4-5h) even though we basically always have the lowest prices then.
Why do you say "embrace nuclear" when the EU has substantial existing and planned nuclear plants? (Current gen is something like 24% nuclear in EU, 20% in wider Europe, 18% USA, 4.4% China)
And anyway, alongside that world leading nuclear already in existence why wouldn't they just install lots of cheap solar and wind, and heat pumps and EVs and reduce their imports of energy from their current high levels (about .6 Trillion euros in 2022, down to .35 in 2024 though that seems mostly a change in price, volume has declined only slightly)
Embrace nuclear would be continuing the existing recent trend of the Germans stopping talking down to the French, and also figuring out how to build new ones in a timely matter.
Solar is pretty terrible outside of Spain, and even there the latitude is not great.
- embrace nuclear
- embrace North Africa, admitting them as member states, and doing massive solar there, and doing massive grid expansion to carry it north. And then in top of that, will their way to sufficient storage like the rest of us.
We'll see what they choose :D