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Energy modelling

Clean grids with current technology

Nature Climate Change volume 6, pages 441–442 (2016)Cite this article

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The need for new energy storage is often seen as an obstacle to integrating renewable electricity into national power systems. Modelling shows that existing technologies could provide significant emissions reductions in the US without the need for storage, however.

With the new UNFCCC Paris Agreement as a foundation, the world is looking to clean, renewable energy solutions to global warming. Such solutions, if successful on a global scale, could avert millions of premature deaths associated with outdoor and indoor air pollution each year, create more jobs than are lost, allow countries to become more energy independent, and take billions of people out of energy poverty — including the 1.3 billion who currently have no access to energy. However, critics of highly renewable energy systems point to the potential high costs of storage to provide power when there is not enough intermittent wind and solar energy generation to meet demand.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Mark Z. Jacobson is in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305-4020, USA,

    Mark Z. Jacobson

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  1. Mark Z. Jacobson
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Correspondence to Mark Z. Jacobson.

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Jacobson, M. Clean grids with current technology. Nature Clim Change 6, 441–442 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2926

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