Musings on grand renewable energy plans.
The basic idea of this repository is to explore a couple of different ideas for a grand renewable energy plan, which could meet all the world's energy needs. This project was inspired originally by reading Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air.
Since there is enough Sunlight and wind power available to power everything, the most interesting question seems to be: What regions would one have to cover with solar farms (either PV or collecting) and wind turbines in order to get as stable a supply as possible of energy, while keeping down the total footprint of the total system? Wind and Sun are variable, but by connecting large geographic regions into one grid, one might hope to average out the variability of these power sources, thus minimizing the need for grid-scale energy storage.
A secondary question that might be interesting to explore is: What regions could one place pumped storage in, in order to have a sufficient supply of energy to smooth out power variability?