I didn’t read the whole article and honestly I’m not qualified to even comment about the materiality of it, but it certainly reminded me of Bob Metcalfe saying, quite loudly, that the internet was going to “catastrophically collapse” in 1996 or he would “eat his words”[0].<p>This is the guy who invented Ethernet, who knew in great technical detail what he was talking about.<p>But just like the internet in 1996, I’m sure there are plenty of people in the industry who can also foresee what problems there are going to be with renewables - and an increasingly large number of those people have jobs that depend on solving them.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Metcalfe#Web_predictions" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Metcalfe#Web_prediction...</a>
There is a lot of research on exactly the supposedly overlooked problems. This article doesn't even name check the heavily researched solutions to low inertia in power grids. The term "grid forming" (including quotes) has 10.000 hits on google scholar.<p>In summary, this is just another anti renewables "I know better than all the experts" blog post.<p>Edit: If it turns out that we need conventional types of inertia and new technologies do not suffice we can use synchronous condensers. It will increase cost, but so will using nuclear.
Nuclear definitely needs to be a larger part of our energy future. This article briefly alludes to its "social and political" challenges, but that undersells how nuclear is subject to more impact study per watt than any fossil fuel plant ever has. But the basis of that is simple economics: an economy dominated by fossil fuels (with an increasing share coming from "green" tech that will still always need a reliable base load that fossil fuels will be happy to provide) will spend large amounts of effort minimizing the benefits of a tech whose RoI to the owner is measured over tens of decades.
I'm sure their premise that academics study something in isolation and extrapolate possibilities from there is problematic.<p>But the author also focuses on papers that study 100% renewables grid.<p>I find it pretty annoying that people want to scuttle the first 80% renewable grid because of the problems of the last 5%. Smells like good old fossil FUD.
I'm sitting in an energy system modelling conference, I can reach out and touch a dozen people who know and care an awful lot about grid stability and various solutions.