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by sofixa
343 days ago
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> This is false. Power usage everywhere is highest when the sun is shining While the biggest peak is around midday, the second biggest is in the evening (most people are home, cooking, watching TV/listening to music/playing video games/etc; or in restaurants, clubs, cinemas, etc) which, depending on location and time of year, can easily be after sunset (e.g. half the year in the Northern hemisphere for sure). You still need enough power to cover that, especially if it has been a cloudy/rainy day, or week, or month. > Non-renewable plants are the ones that need buffer. Solar, wind, hydro etc can all be connected to a grid with zero instability- you just unplug them if nobody wants the power. Non-renewable plants have slow ramp speeds- they need the buffer in order to follow a changing load And this is so easy and foolproof to do, just check out the Iberian power outage. |
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That's besides the point! The window of highest demand completely covers the window of solar. You can build a LOT of solar before storage starts becoming cheaper than just building more solar. You only need storage if it's ALL solar- you can have a majority of your power supplied by solar with hardly any storage! There this idea that if you overbuild solar that power will have nowhere to go, or something- you can just turn it off. You use backup power for the non-shining hours and you're totally fine.
> And this is so easy and foolproof to do, just check out the Iberian power outage.
In fact I did[1]. Page 117: "In fact, in most of the network nodes analyzed, there is no correlation between voltage stability and the amount of solar generation or the amount of coupled synchronous generation"
They had 2.3 seconds of inertia, more than the regulated 2 seconds. Power sloshing through interconnects caused plant ramp rates to be overwhelmed one-by-one, causing the cascading failure, because they had no buffering. If they were all solar or wind plants, the failure would not have happened!
[1]: https://media.licdn.com/dms/document/media/v2/D4D1FAQGcyyYYr...