How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream

A lot of the best sites for pumped storage are already developed as pumped storage. It's kind of the opposite of other storage technologies. As sites get developed the economics of future sites get worse.

> Lower costs, though, have also made wind power more appealing elsewhere. Once mostly concentrated in northern Europe, Mr. Nauen is optimistic that new markets will emerge in Asia and the United States.

South America too. In just the last 12 months, installed capacity in Brazil went from 10.4 GW to 12.5 GW (source: Boletim Mensal de Geração Eólica - ONS).

The interesting question is what effect clean energy has to the usage of hydrocarbons. Will it bring reduce global demand or just reduce the price of energy.

The good news is: CO2 emission intensity is going down globally and emissions per capita in US, China and EU28 are going down.

The bad news are: Emissions per capita are still going up globally, and hydrocarbon usage and CO2 emissions are breaking records year after year. http://folk.uio.no/roberan/img/GCP2017/PNG/s09_FossilFuel_an... Economic downturn was the only thing causing temporary decline.

It looks like clean energy reduces the demand in developed countries, thus reducing the prices of hydrocarbons. It will not reduce the CO2 emissions globally, it just moves them from the developed world to the developing world. Maybe it slows down CO2 emission growth rate?

http://folk.uio.no/roberan/learnmore/more_warning_signs.shtm...

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EDIT: Just to point out how complex the dynamics between clean energy, hydrocarbons and policy are, here is nice recent research paper from Acemoglu and Rafey:

Mirage on the Horizon: Geoengineering and Carbon Taxation Without Commitment https://economics.mit.edu/files/14855

>Abstract: We show that, in a model without commitment to future policies, geoengineering breakthroughs can have adverse environmental and welfare effects because they change the (equilibrium) carbon taxes. In our model, energy producers emit carbon, which creates a negative environmental externality, and may decide to switch to cleaner technology. A benevolent social planner sets carbon taxes without commitment. Higher future carbon taxes both reduce emissions given technology and encourage energy producers to switch to cleaner technology. Geoengineering advances, which reduce the negative environmental effects of the existing stock of carbon, decrease future carbon taxes and thus discourage private investments in conventional clean technology. We characterize the conditions under which these advances diminish—rather than improve—environmental quality and welfare.

According to Wikipedia we have 15 GWh of pumped storage capacity in Scotland. Per annum we use 27,000 GWh. So by my calculations we have a pumped storage battery that lasts about 5 hours.

(NB: I didn't check whether the power output of this battery is enough to actually meet demand, but wikipedia says it can run at full capacity for 22 hours, so no)

Problem is that these are political markets not market markets. Denmark spent a lot of money on getting their windmill industry up and running and windmills still aren't solving the base problem as they aren't reliable for all sorts of weather.

Furthermore, windmilss don't really scale well, Nuclear on the other hand which is both safer and more scalable and greener would change that but right now only the Chinese seems to have realized that.