Access to a large electric system provides big economies of scale not only in terms of diversity and low cost of power generation, but even more so for minimizing necessary reserves and for making it easier to balance variable resources like wind and solar.
Islands without access to neighboring electric systems are in every aspect on their own. They have to generate all the power they need and they must themselves keep the system reliable no matter what. Adding more renewable energy to an island system can be an opportunity, but large amounts of variable renewable energy increases the challenge of maintaining reliability at reasonable costs.
The German Energiewende is the largest undertaking in the world to transition to renewable energy. Rightfully it is getting a lot of attention. There already many lessons to be learnt of what to do and also some of what not to do.
Smaller in magnitude but also well worth paying attention to are two American versions of Energiewende. One is a state, Hawaii, and the other is a city, Fort Collins, Colorado.
Batteries for electric energy storage has become like the search for the holy grail of enabling more intermittent renewable energy, wind and solar, both for integration with the electric grid as well as for “stand-alone” installations.
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