Solving Renewable Energy Intermittency: Can the United States Rely on 100% Renewables?

While wind and solar have become cheaper forms of energy to build in most places, the intermittency of renewable energy remains a challenge to converting to 100 percent renewable energy usage. The intermittent nature of renewable energy causes challenges for the energy grid to meet supply and demand. What will the grid look like in the future? If we were to design the grid tomorrow, how would we build it to take advantage of renewable energy? Chelle Izzi, ’04BUS, executive director of distributed generation at NextEra Energy Resources; Donna Sanders, ’17BUS, founder and CEO of Virimodo; and David Snydacker, CEO of Lilac Solutions, discussed the challenges of converting our energy usage to 100 percent renewables, as well as possible solutions to the energy grid that can be implemented to convert to 100 percent renewable energy. This session was moderated by Steven Cohen, Professor in the Practice of Public Affairs at SIPA; director of the Research Program on Sustainability Policy and Management at The Earth Institute; and director of the MPA Program in Environmental Science and Policy.

[danielschmidt]

We need blockchain energy management with flexible loads and energy storage. Smart contracts can automatically make decisions based on the real time value of either charging or discharging batteries and powering flexible loads like cryptocurrency mining or a variety of intrinsic value production like automated manufacturing or desalination. Indoor agriculture can be paired with energy storage for resilient food production. Regenerative agriculture can be paired ground mounted solar. Check out American Solar Grazing Association. Wind can be paired with large scale permaculture or large grazing animals like Bison. Floating offshore wind can be paired with sustainable mariculture for marine health.

We have the technology.

I am excited for the potential for moon mining to return material via a rail gun on the moon with automated landing pods being crafted on the moon by robots with parachutes for all those rare earth metals to land safely on the earth. No need to trash the earth to get this stuff.

We need to focus on production and blockchain management for now I think. Mechanical storage with compressed air, stationary hydrogen fuel cell technologies or adapted natural gas peaker plants.

Cheers. Merry existence y'all. Peace on Earth. Keep up the hard work. It's a long and winding road that leads us home.

[윤찬휘-bp]

nuclear energy is clean energy. that will be renewable