With energy from wind farms 1000 km away, hydro and biofuels closer by, and nearby storage. At the beginning, you'll probably also have a small amount of "dirty" generation as backup, but which sits idle most of the time.
"Increasing the hydro production from 10% (present value) of the electricity generated to 80% seems clearly impossible, and even a multiplication by 2 might be out of reach. "
"If all the electricity production in France was wind generated, storage in batteries would probably be impossible to ensure: to store one week of electricity consumption (which is over1 TWh per day for the whole country), the country should have 7 tons of lead-acid batteries (these batteries can store 30 Wh per kg) per French person (lead-acid batteries are not precisely perfectly “clean” regarding the environmental impact of their manufacturing and their end of life…)."
If you seek the truth, diversify your sources and don't take article from 2013 or even 2000 when talking about energy and grid.
For wind power he is taking the example of a wind turbine of 175 kW of nominal power... Most onshore turbine are 10 more powerful, and Siemens Gamesa has a 14 MW offshore turbine in the works
For storage, he is taking totally stupid hypothesis (nobody want to use 100% onshore old wind turbine with no change to the current demand and 1 week of total backup), and one old technology, and is never mentioning demand response or thermal storage...
A 100% renewable grid, would require big (profitable) energy efficiency investment, big investment in thermal storage and demand response, some onshore wind, some offshore wind, some solar facing different direction, some biomass, a bit of geothermal power when available, and hydro power like now... Some smart grid and a bit of electrical storage (many different technology available).
Hydro would essentially be used as a battery, not to produce most of the power. You can generate hydro power when there's a lull in the wind or on a cloudy day.
I'm really talking about biomass, and I mention it because it's more dispatchable, meaning that it can be used to smooth some of the fluctuations in wind and solar.
There are better technologies than lead-acid batteries. Thermal salt storage and flow batteries are two interesting options. Thermal salt storage has already been used in conjunction with solar thermal energy, but it could be used with any generation source. There are some ongoing large flow battery demonstration projects, such as an 800 MWh / 200 MW battery being built in Dalian, China.
5% of the surface of the country isn't so bad. But wind is stronger and steadier offshore, so it's better to line the coastline with wind farms.
