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Are there ways to make wind and solar more reliable sources of energy?

Thursday, May 28, 2020
By William Boger
YES

Planning for storage and distribution can address worries about the reliability of renewable energy sources.

In 2018, researchers led by Stanford's Mark Z. Jacobson, a Stanford engineering professor, devised a study that showed three separate ways to avoid blackouts over a five-year period using currently available technology if global energy sources transitioned completely to wind, water and sunlight. “Our main result is that there are multiple solutions to the problem,” Jacobson said. “This is important because the greatest barrier to the large-scale implementation of clean renewable energy is people’s perception that it’s too hard to keep the lights on with random wind and solar output.”

The main challenge in their scenarios is required coordination across national boundaries, as neighboring countries would have to collaborate to manage the grid for their region.

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