| You excel at insulting people online. We've been here before. This is what you do instead of having conversations. Not taking your bait. My claim is that solar requires 100% backup. OK, let's break it down: Solar Output:
Under ideal conditions, roughly inverted parabolic output
1.00 ┼ ╭────╮
0.90 ┤ ╭─╯ ╰─╮
0.80 ┤ ╭─╯ ╰─╮
0.70 ┤ ╭╯ ╰╮
0.60 ┤ ╭╯ ╰╮
0.50 ┤ │ │
0.40 ┤ ╭╯ ╰╮
0.30 ┤ ╭╯ ╰╮
0.20 ┤ ╭╯ ╰╮
0.10 ┤ │ │
0.00 ┼──────────────╯ ╰─────────
Clouds and weather can cause up to 100% drop in output any time
Rain will drop your peak output practically down to zero all day
Dirt will drop total output by a variable amount until cleaned
1.00 ┼ ╭───╮
0.90 ┤ ╭─╮│ ╰╮
0.80 ┤ ╭─╯ ││ │ ╭╮
0.70 ┤ ╭╯ ││ │ │╰╮
0.60 ┤ ╭╯ ││ │ │ ╰╮
0.50 ┤ │ ││ │ │ │
0.40 ┤ ╭╯ ││ ╰─╯ ╰╮
0.30 ┤ ╭╯ ││ ╰╮
0.20 ┤ ╭╯ ││ ╰╮
0.10 ┤ │ ││ │
0.00 ┼──────────────╯ ╰╯ ╰─────────
Daytime:
You need up to 100% backup to be available at any time.
Night:
To state the obvious, 100% backup is required.
Conclusion:
If you need reliable 100% backup at any point
during 24 hours, this backup capacity has to be
available 24/7/365.
The above is absolutely true.Regarding the link you provided. I am familiar with this article, which, of course, confirms my point. Figure 5, which is titled "Maps of electricity system reliabilities under the most reliable solar-wind mix without excess generation or energy storage", puts the US at less than 88%. This means that, ON AVERAGE, 12% of the time you need 100% backup for the most optimal form of solar and wind combined. I loudly highlighted ON AVERAGE because it is important to understand this is a problem when dealing with statistics. You cannot apply the average of the average of the average to an entire population. This is known as the tyranny of the averages. Averages are fantastic to wave hands around and talk about generalities. They do not cover my little town of 300K residents going dark for two hours because the solar system powering it had no backup. The real numbers, once you start to get closer to local realities, are not represented by these average. The real numbers are much worse. Solar cannot exist without external backup. Solar and wind cannot exist without external backup. That's the real conversation we have to have. Somehow people read this to mean that I am saying solar and wind are bad and not usable. That is not AT ALL what I am saying. I am simply highlighting that we cannot "go green" just with these technologies. And it gets much, much worse, when we start to throw in hundreds of millions of electric vehicles. My point, in the aggregate, is that we, in the US, desperately need to change our thinking with regards to nuclear. Otherwise we are going to end-up with a bunch of solar and wind backed-up by massive amounts of power being generated by burning stuff. Try again.
No personal attacks this time.
Where, exactly, did I lie?
Show your work.
|
Then note w2e, hydro and other average-energy-limited dispatchable sources exist. A hydro system which can provide 100MW on average can provide 1GW peak. There are a few tens of GW of waste stream methane available in the US alone. It can be stored and burnt at any time to meet unshiftable demand.
Then note that dispatchable loads such as EV charging exist and exceed non-dispatchable ones. They make VRE easier to use, not harder as you claim.
Then note when pools are pumped, water towers are fied, thermal storage in buildings is charged, zinc refineries and so on are run. It's not done in the middle of the night in regions with thermal generation because people just love noise and graveyard shifts.
If you have 1 watt of constant load, 2 watts (average over 6 months) of dispatchable load, 2 net watts of solar (ie. 4 nameplate watts), long distance transmission, 2 net watts of wind, and 1 net watt of hydro and green fuel burnable in an OCGT, then you have plenty of power.
You're willfully ignoring systems and demand shifting and trying to claim only always-on thermal generation works. This is a lie.
Even assuming fossil fuel for the week a year the system has low output, a VRE dominated grid still cheaper and greener than alternatives and you still don't need to run your electrolysers or zinc refineries or arc furnaces or thermal storage heaters. And if you have a day warning the Al smelters can clear the lines too. This is done all the time in systems dominated by thermal generation to meet demand spikes. Claiming these loads need backup instead of being backup is a lie.
You're trying to pretend turning a fossil fuel generator for the non-dispatchable loads on ever eliminates any gains from the whole system just because it has the same power as the un-shiftable peak demand. This is also a lie.
You're trying to pretend that fixed loads are constant, so a power-limited thermal generator would need no storage or overprovision. This is also a lie.
You're trying to pretend weather events where there is zero wind or sun across a large region for over a day are common. This has never happened. This is a lie.
You're trying to pretend thermal generators never go offline in a correlated way so that any correlated downtime is exclusively VRE. This is a lie.
You're trying to pretend building a system that can eliminate 85-95% of emissions in a year or two for a tenth of the price and then startig on the boondoggle which eliminates 90% of emissions and exports the rest to Niger isn't the obvious and objectively correct answer even if your above lies were accurate.