This is very good news - we can have a renewable energy supply with the technologies of today! An ingenious team of German researchers has found a way to combine solar, wind and biomass energy into a network that overcomes the natural limitations of weather-dependent energy production. These are the key points:

  • Distribute the wind turbines and the solar collectors far apart from each other across the country. This minimizes the effect of bad weather on one location - the sun could be shining or the wind blowing more strongly on some other locations instead.
    Renewable energy plants distributed over Germany
     
  • Use biomass plants to fill the gaps should there be any. These plants run on chopped up corn.
  • In case of overproduction from wind plants, use that electricity to pump water into a reservoir of a hydroelectric plant. That allows you to store the energy and access it when needed.
  • A central control unit tries to predict the energy demand and the energy production and then matches the two with the available means:
    Central control unit schema

The current installation in Germany produces 23 Megawatts, enough for 17'000 households (source: ZDF umwelt, 09 Dec 2007).

To learn more about this project, check out the following links:
http://www.kombikraftwerk.de/index.php?id=27

Technical summary of the Combined Power Plant
http://www.kombikraftwerk.de/fileadmin/downloads/Technik_Kombikraftwerk_...

5 minutes report from the German TV show "ZDF Umwelt" (sorry, only in German):
http://www.zdf.de/ZDFmediathek/content/373390?inPopup=true

Institute for solar energy supply (research), Kassel, Germany (where the project started):
http://www.iset.uni-kassel.de