Electrifying everything does not solve the climate crisis, but it is a great start

Walking into the grid control room at 50Hertz, a Berlin-based utility, on the morning of May 13th felt like walking onto the bridge of a spaceship: screens full of data, an air of competent calm and the underlying sense of an immense flow of power being guided on its journey. This hyper-secure site (and its mirror in another location) are charged with controlling the flow of electricity to 18m people in eastern and northern Germany.

Today the screens show 28% of that flow coming from wind farms and 24% from solar panels. A decade ago the custodians of the grids which keep the rich world’s lights on would have told you this was impossible. Renewables were too troublesome, too hard to balance with demand moment by moment, too prone to fluctuations in the frequency of the current they provided. In 2011 a symposium of electricity mavens convened by mit concluded that “Too much electricity generation from intermittent renewables is as much of a problem as too little generation.”