Energy storage limitations
Martin Giesselbach has responded to my op-ed to say that I am wrong about storing energy from wind and solar power. The issue is that without storage, these renewable energy sources are of limited value since they are intermittent. He points to pumped storage which has been available for a long time. I'm well aware of pumped storage and its benefits. In my article I was working with a word limit and had to omit various details.
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Pumped storage is a terrific method. However, it can only be used where geography permits, and that is very limited. It also requires flooding vast areas so proposals would often be defeated due to environmental concerns and high land costs. These are the same reasons that we only get a small fraction of our electricity from hydro-power. This site discusses a variety of storage methods and explains that "to date no widely available, affordable solution to the challenge of mass energy storage has been found."
Jim Ogden
Dover Township
We can deploy renewables extensively before any kind of storage becomes necessary. However, once we reach high penetrations of wind and solar on the grid, technologies like compressed air energy storage (CAES) can help balance the variability of these energy sources. CAES is a low cost storage technology with a lot of promise for balancing. For those interested, I recently co-atuthored a report on this technology here: http://www.princeton.edu/~ssuccar/caesReport.html