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Originally Posted by ME_Andy
I'm sure you know that California (22% renewable in 2014) and Hawaii (21%) are quickly following in Orkney's footsteps.
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Orkney manages 100% renewable, primarily wind. But, I'd be willing to be that the cable connecting the island is regularly seeing large currents feeding the island and large currents from the island. Cut this cable and I bet the whole system falls apart.
The problem with wind and solar production is that you need to deal with it's variability. When it accounts for small percentages of your production, gas-fired plants can be used to pick up the slack. But over about 20% of production, you need some method of storing the electricity. Either by transferring it to another consumer (and transferring it back when the wind dies down) or in a battery of some sort. However, there are no viable batteries with sufficient capacity currently available.
Germany is a good example of this. They get about 28% of their power from renewables on a yearly basis, but have gotten as high as 78% of their consumption generated by renewables. The slack is picked up by turning on and off gas/coal/lignite plants and selling to Austria...
A New Record: Renewables Make Up 78% of Germany’s Power Consumption in an Afternoon : Greentech Media
Orkney is a very small community with an abundance of wind. This is not necessarily scalable to big cities.
That said...
My state has about 75% power generated by renewables.
