Two days ago there was a storm that damaged some generators and left the batteries very low that they resorted to rolling blackouts, as there was not enough electricity for the island.
Yes a storm could damage the coal plant with some small probability. But now you have replaced the coal plant with batteries + solar. Solar will be disabled by every large storm due to cloud cover. The grid will certainly be less reliable.
From solar panels that we track at my organization the solar generation decreased by ~90% at 90% cloud cover. Cloud cover isn't the most important metric, it's irradiance, but still a good indicator and so yes, in a storm the power generation will drop by atleast 90% probably
> in a storm the power generation will drop by atleast 90% probably
This is incorrect for several reasons first we care about Wind + Solar + Hydro not Solar alone.
8X % reduction in solar over 15 minutes sure, but track full days output and it’s not 90% across the full day. Similarly you rarely see 100% of theoretical output over a full day, so it’s really the delta between expected output and minimum output that matters.
Also, you don’t build exactly as much generation as you would need assuming 100% output every single day. That’s just as true for Nuclear/coal etc as it is Solar / wind. Redundancy has a cost, but it can effectively guarantee a surplus.
Modern turbines can adjust the angle of their blades to extract less energy from the wind. There’s always tradeoffs so people still chose maximum wind speeds based on the area. But, we’re talking being near the center of a hurricane not just storms at that point.
“The beautifully bright and still weather may have been a welcome reason to hold off reaching for our winter coats, but the lack of wind can be a serious issue when we consider where our electricity might be coming from.”
Seems like a good case for using wind or wave power which would presumably provide max power during a storm when solar provides less power. Of course, I suppose a bad storm could also damage these forms of energy generation as well.
More likely that it would affect electricity cables and knock out power in a lot of areas. But that would be true regardless of the power source.
Batteries, like coal plants should be pretty resilient. Wind turbines should be mostly fine as well. The Chinese actually have lots of off shore wind and seasonal typhoons. You can expect some percentage of turbines to need maintenance after that probably. But overall it should be fine. Solar panels basically produce less power with cloud cover. And if they aren't mounted properly there might be some storm damage. But otherwise, that should be fine too. Hail would be a bigger challenge than wind. There were some reports of freakishly large hail stones destroying some solar panels a while back.
Mostly, having a lot of decentralized power generation in the form of wind turbines and solar panels all over the place is a good idea from a resilience point of view.
Wouldn't it have to have happened after the plant shutdown in order for it to coincide? If it happened prior, then it would have been clearly unrelated. If you shut down a power plant and run into power issues down the road, a connection seems likely.
>> Two days ago there was a storm that damaged some generators and left the batteries very low that they resorted to rolling blackouts, as there was not enough electricity for the island.
> It literally did not coincide at all, given that the coal plant in question closed in September 2022.
You simply don't get it. You're oddly requiring the bad storm happen soon after the plant was closed down for there to be a connection, which is obviously not the case. One can take an action which creates a vulnerability that takes some time to finally cause a problem.
You're saying something as silly as: the removal of the bolts holding in the emergency exit plug did not cause the hole in Alaska Airlines flight 1282, because the door didn't fly off immediately after the bolts were removed.
OP edited their post after this reply and removed the word ‘coincide’. It’s why multiple replies have it.
The original lack of capacity was caused by two malfunctioning units in a thermal plant. The capacity from this coal plant could only have allowed for one more failed unit.
If they kept the coal plant operational for when solar is not viable (shocker, I know, we can’t always see the Sun), then it wouldn’t have happened. Any point after September 2022 that they suffer a lack-of-solar-based blackout directly coincides with lacking the reliability of a coal power plant.