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There is plenty of green energy projects going on at the moment. Large scale wind energy production has proven itself in North Europe, on the other side of the Atlantic there is predictions that by 2030 it could power up to 20% of the US grid.

Solar and wind technologies are at the moment the only two proven and truly environmentally friendly green energy technologies. Just by improving solar panel efficiencies and multiplying wind turbines should be enough to give energy production a real boost with economies of scale and low costs kicking in.

But there are problems not encountered with fossil fuel technologies. Even the sunniest places can have cloudy days and windy places are nowhere near as predictable as burning coal or nuclear fuel. Consequently, without taking further measures, traditional energy production will remain the backbone supplemented by solar and wind power when conditions allow.

Present day grids are unable to cope with large percentages of energy produced by solar and wind because they have two major limitations:

1. Absence of energy storage: Solar and wind farms require some form of energy storage to direct excess energy produced on very sunny and peak wind periods respectively. This energy can be released at night and on low wind days. Current grids don’t accommodate such functionality, limiting our two most precious green energy sources to the most primitive kind of use, in other words energy consumption only when it can be produced, the only other choices being the impossibility of staying without energy or reverting to good old polluting sources.
2. Absence of intelligent energy transmission: Less reliance on polluting energy sources implies that we are using everything we got, in other words lots of alternative sources, depending on region, local conditions and time of day. Using a simplified example, while south Europe could by a large solar energy producer during daytime, its energy at nights could be sourced from wind turbines in windy locations in north Europe. Such massive changes in energy sources and locations require a flexibility and level of control that at the moment simply doesn’t exist.

For now, wind and solar energy can only benefit those regions that are blessed with consistently sunny or windy conditions, and as explained earlier, there is no guarantee of energy flow at all times. To overturn this unsatisfactory and very limiting situation it is necessary that in parallel with alternative energy production we must sort out energy storage and distribution at massive scales. These two factors will be instrumental in ensuring that we have green energy available when we need it and that we can efficiency put in our plan any source wherever and whenever it is available. This of course requires EU and US level projects, plans for which at the moment we do not have.

If we already have problems in productively channeling energy with only about 2% of it coming from green sources worldwide, imagine what problems we would meet with ten times that! Strictly local energy production -for example rooftop solar panels- is a helpful factor, but we like it or not it is huge scale projects that will truly make a difference and get us out of our destructive habits. And here the only option is the active involvement of governments, simply because it all requires funding that cannot be handled by privateers. For both storage and transmission there is solutions. In various posts on green energy I have touched the issue of storage and I plan to come back with some more information in an independent post.