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by bryanlarsen 43 days ago
> You say "occasional" dunkelflaute, but we have no idea whether occasional is once a season or once a decade.

Yes, these are things we know with a high degree of statistical confidence. Many locations have hundreds of years of hourly weather records.

We know that Europe has never had an hour where there wasn't significant sun or significant wind somewhere on the continent any hour in the past 30+ years. The same can be said for North America, and Asia.

1 comments

way to miss the point.

What use is hundreds of hours of weather records when the climate is changing in ways we do not yet understand?

"somewhere" on the continent being windy is useless unless we have the transmission capacity to move that much power across thousands of kilometres. See also what just happened in australia last week - nearly 40% of the country stuck with very low wind speeds for nearly a week. What then?