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by Paradigma11 476 days ago
A step forward would be to show for all those solar/wind + battery proposals the expected uptime and distributions given historical weather and how climate change might affect that.

For example this solution would be sufficient and have no blackouts/brownouts per year in 99% of historical data....

1 comments

We can do a pretty good job of predicting solar and wind production; that's done routinely. What's harder is predicting how load will change when electric energy is nearly free in most daytimes and expensive on calm nights.
That does not matter. You can only postpone washing your clothes for so long and heating in northern winters is non optional. The problem are things like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute

Extreme weather events are what is important and we do have the data.

Heating in particular is an especially easy problem to solve; various kinds of thermal energy storage (sensible-heat, phase-change, TCES) can store heat for later climate-control purposes several orders of magnitude more cheaply than batteries. Washing your clothes is a harder problem, although a stockpile of clean clothes is easily stored.

Predicting how willing Swedes will be 10 years from now to buy extra jeans and install phase-change energy storage in their houses, however, that's beyond anybody's ability.