Every week NU.nl answers a climate question from a reader. This week: Will it be possible in the future to get all our energy from renewable sources such as sun and wind?
The Netherlands is already getting more and more electricity from solar panels and windmills, but the majority of all the energy we use is still ‘fossil’. Think of the petrol in the car, the gas from the stove and the coal that is burned to make steel.
On our reaction platform NUjij a reader wondered: how realistic is it to make 100 percent of our energy sustainable? “Will that meet all our needs, or should we keep gas or nuclear power stations as a backup?”
Not so long ago, this was the subject of fierce discussion among scientists, says Auke Hoekstra. He conducts research into sustainable energy systems at Eindhoven University of Technology and is director of the NEON Research research programme.
“Our current system is very simple: get fossil fuels from somewhere and burn them when you need energy,” he says. A fully renewable system becomes more complex: when the sun shines and the wind blows, energy is generated. But if not, we still need energy.
Import and storage
We can partly compensate for this by using energy more flexibly. “We are going to try to use energy at the times when we would normally have sun and wind left over,” says Hoekstra. At those moments, for example, we will charge cars.
We also need to start using electricity in more places instead of (fossil) fuels. Think of electric cars, heat pumps and electrified factories.
At times when the weather is not good, we will import electricity from neighboring countries where, for example, the wind is blowing. Or from countries such as Norway, where electricity is generated using hydropower. That’s in the flat Netherlands hardly possiblebecause you need height difference and reservoirs.
That is why we will also have to be able to store large amounts of energy. That can be done in many ways. For example, by means of batteries, which make the solar power from the day available at night. But also with an underground water reservoir that is heated with solar energy in the summer and used to heat houses in the winter.
Also with hydrogen or metal fuels, a way of storing energy in metal powder, electricity can be stored in the longer term. These are relatively new technologies that are not yet being used on a large scale, but may eventually play an important role in our energy system.
What will it cost?
According to Hoekstra, it is now clear that with all these technologies it will be possible to set up a fully renewable energy system. “Actually, the scientific discussion is no longer about whether it is possible,” he says.
However, there are still scientists who think that an energy system with non-renewable elements will be cheaper. Think of nuclear power stations, or natural gas power stations with an installation to capture and store CO2 emissions.
Other scientists suspect that the difference will be small, or that completely renewable energy will become cheaper. At all kinds of universities, computer models are used to calculate which combination of energy technologies is ultimately the most advantageous, but different models work with different assumptions and yield different results.
The tricky part is that scientists then have to calculate how much a nuclear power plant or a green hydrogen factory will cost in twenty years. This also applies to technologies that are still in their infancy, such as metal fuels† “They already work fine in the laboratory, but it is difficult to establish exactly what the costs of scaling up will be,” says Hoekstra.
Scientific thinking is shifting
He sees that scientific thinking about fully renewable energy systems is shifting rapidly. “Fifteen years ago there were maybe four or five scientists who published something about that every now and then,” he says. Now there are hundreds, and it is more or less undisputed that it is possible to obtain all energy from sun, wind and water.
“I think that’s so cool. It’s been like, ‘Oh God, we’re doomed, this will never work out’ to ‘Gosh, that could make energy 50 percent more expensive and don’t we have a way to make it a little less expensive?’ That’s a huge difference, of course.”
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