Those cities are not run on 100% renewables. They have the capacity to run entirely on renewables, if the wind blew constantly & it was sunny overnight. In reality they depend heavily on outside electricity. Perhaps over a year they "balance out" input & output? But there'd be days & weeks with little or no power without outside sources.
There is no current battery tech to store power for 4+ months until needed. Add to that how the current "battery farms" tend to go up in flames on a regular basis, just like EV batteries.
Oslo and Reykjavik are unique in their access to ample geothermal. A few towns in Cali are too, up in the mountains.
You're never going to have four months without sunlight or wind. Power plants don't need battery banks. Battery banks are for portable stuff like cars. Solar plants simply heat nitrate salts to as high as 600 C, and then that energy is released throughout the night, boiling water and running turbines. Calibrated correctly, you can have 24/7 output on just nine hours of sunlight a day.
It's not optimal to try to run a city or country on a single renewable source - which is why you want multiple kinds of plants, each filling in any gaps left by the others. Solar, wind, hydroelectric, geothermal, tidal, and biomass.
That isn't how it works. W&S make "excess power" in the Summer months, primarily. The grid dumps those extra volts into the batteries then. The grid needs the most back-up in the winter months, it can rarely add power during the Spring or Fall, and almost never in the Winter.
Thus the power goes in in the Summer & is needed to be drawn out in the winter, some 4 months later. Same exact thing for thermal salt, which afaik hasn't been done on more than a very small scale. Nothing remotely close to a power grid.
There are no more large hydroelectric sites available in the developed world. None. Any small sites would be cost prohibitive. Geothermal is VERY location specific. As is tidal, (Edit: which includes "wave generation" too, right?) which has failed every test so far AND would cause massive disruption to shipping and nature if installed in anything approaching grid scale (Edit: that's for wave power, IDK how pure tidal power could possibly generate enough power to make a difference). Even as much as 20% of a local grid would be both expensive and disruptive.
Biomass = burning things. Sure it's a pretty good way to get rid of some trash & waste materials. But it stinks, people hate that, and it is limited by how much very heavy materials you have stored to be burned. In Europe they import wood pellets from the USA as back-up material to their trash. They cut down trees, ship them by diesel (Well, dirty bunker oil actually, which is, iirc, 3x more polluting) across the ocean and ship them to the Biomass sites by train & truck. Not green by any measure.
Just a reminder: every single kW/h of Wind, Solar or other "renewables" must have 100% backup. That backup cannot reasonably be hydro or nuclear, those are "baseline" sources. That leaves FF and batteries, or thermal salt, but that's not proven to work on a large scale yet.
Without backup there would be regular brown and black-outs. Those are hugely destructive to industry and commerce. Many companies left Ontario during the Liberal Party reign there because of their "Green Policies" making electricity 3x more expensive. If regular, random blackouts were added in? The flight would be huuuuge.
They shut down Nuclear reactors & coal, "replacing" them with Solar mostly, and Wind. For "backup" they import expensive electricity from Quebec or the USA. Manitoba is 600km away from the demand, eh? There's only 1-2 power lines connecting MB with Western Ontario, which is largely unpopulated until you hit Thunder Bay :/
Cool, which cities are powered exclusively by solar/renewables?
Burlington, VT, Georgetown, TX, and Basel, Switzerland are powered entirely by renewables with an emphasis on solar.
The biggest renewable-exclusive cities are Oslo and Reykjavík, though in their cases it's mostly geothermal.
Those cities are not run on 100% renewables. They have the capacity to run entirely on renewables, if the wind blew constantly & it was sunny overnight. In reality they depend heavily on outside electricity. Perhaps over a year they "balance out" input & output? But there'd be days & weeks with little or no power without outside sources.
There is no current battery tech to store power for 4+ months until needed. Add to that how the current "battery farms" tend to go up in flames on a regular basis, just like EV batteries.
Oslo and Reykjavik are unique in their access to ample geothermal. A few towns in Cali are too, up in the mountains.
You're never going to have four months without sunlight or wind. Power plants don't need battery banks. Battery banks are for portable stuff like cars. Solar plants simply heat nitrate salts to as high as 600 C, and then that energy is released throughout the night, boiling water and running turbines. Calibrated correctly, you can have 24/7 output on just nine hours of sunlight a day.
It's not optimal to try to run a city or country on a single renewable source - which is why you want multiple kinds of plants, each filling in any gaps left by the others. Solar, wind, hydroelectric, geothermal, tidal, and biomass.
That isn't how it works. W&S make "excess power" in the Summer months, primarily. The grid dumps those extra volts into the batteries then. The grid needs the most back-up in the winter months, it can rarely add power during the Spring or Fall, and almost never in the Winter.
Thus the power goes in in the Summer & is needed to be drawn out in the winter, some 4 months later. Same exact thing for thermal salt, which afaik hasn't been done on more than a very small scale. Nothing remotely close to a power grid.
There are no more large hydroelectric sites available in the developed world. None. Any small sites would be cost prohibitive. Geothermal is VERY location specific. As is tidal, (Edit: which includes "wave generation" too, right?) which has failed every test so far AND would cause massive disruption to shipping and nature if installed in anything approaching grid scale (Edit: that's for wave power, IDK how pure tidal power could possibly generate enough power to make a difference). Even as much as 20% of a local grid would be both expensive and disruptive.
Biomass = burning things. Sure it's a pretty good way to get rid of some trash & waste materials. But it stinks, people hate that, and it is limited by how much very heavy materials you have stored to be burned. In Europe they import wood pellets from the USA as back-up material to their trash. They cut down trees, ship them by diesel (Well, dirty bunker oil actually, which is, iirc, 3x more polluting) across the ocean and ship them to the Biomass sites by train & truck. Not green by any measure.
Just a reminder: every single kW/h of Wind, Solar or other "renewables" must have 100% backup. That backup cannot reasonably be hydro or nuclear, those are "baseline" sources. That leaves FF and batteries, or thermal salt, but that's not proven to work on a large scale yet.
Without backup there would be regular brown and black-outs. Those are hugely destructive to industry and commerce. Many companies left Ontario during the Liberal Party reign there because of their "Green Policies" making electricity 3x more expensive. If regular, random blackouts were added in? The flight would be huuuuge.
They shut down Nuclear reactors & coal, "replacing" them with Solar mostly, and Wind. For "backup" they import expensive electricity from Quebec or the USA. Manitoba is 600km away from the demand, eh? There's only 1-2 power lines connecting MB with Western Ontario, which is largely unpopulated until you hit Thunder Bay :/
vermont? really nigga? a mountainous new england state? a region famous for its sunny weather?