| inbluevt | Date: Thursday, 2013/04/11, 12:28 PM | Message # 1 | DMCA |
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Renewable energy is providing reliable electricity today in the United States and around the world. From 2007 to 2012, electricity from renewable sources such as wind and solar nearly quadrupled nationally. This growth is part of a transition away from dirty, coal-burning power plants—which harm public health and destabilize our climate—toward cleaner, more sustainable sources of electricity. Using existing technologies and smart policy decisions, the United States can continue this clean energy transformation while maintaining a reliable and affordable electricity system. Transitioning to a system that relies heavily on wind and solar facilities—which provide variable amounts of power—does pose challenges to man-aging the electricity grid. After all, the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine, and grid operators must match electricity demand with supply each and every moment of the day (see Box 1, p. 2). However, meeting electricity demand in the face of variability and uncertainty is not a new concept for grid operators. They already make adjustments for constantly changing demand, planned power plant outages for maintenance, and outages stemming from severe weather, equipment failure, and other unexpected events. Adding variable energy sources to the system may increase the complexity of the chal-lenge, but does not pose insurmountable technical problems or significant costs.
Read on - you'll feel more hopeful
Message edited by inbluevt - Thursday, 2013/04/11, 12:35 PM |
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