Some key insights from the article:
Basically, what they did was to look at how much batteries would be needed in a given area to provide constant power supply at least 97% of the time, and the calculate the costs of that solar+battery setup compared to coal and nuclear.
Then get it from the sources that already exist. 97% coverage is a great milestone.
Funny enough lots of people hate that. Lots of people have binary thinking, it’s either 100% coal or 100% solar.
Yeah, they do, and they pretend to be wise adults while doing it. Like they’re the only ones who thought of this.
EVs, too. No, we don’t have to wait until they can all do 1000 miles and charge in 5 minutes. 350 miles and 20 minute 10-80% charge is fine for the vast majority of the market.
Urgh, the ones that say “well my ice car can do 700 miles on a tank so until EV can do that I’m not doing it” annoy the hell out of me.
I know damn well they’re never driven that far without stopping at least once
No, but I don’t think you’re appreciating how difficult it would be to fill that 3%. It’s not just about having 3% more power from something. It’s having it at the right time. It needs to be on demand. Having something on demand that has to cover all it’s costs selling just 3% isn’t easy.
It’s more resilient to have mixed supply where multiple types of generation take a proportion. Then when one falls short another can scale up a little.
I understand, but other people lose their shit at not having that 3% and basically equate it to being 100% coal. I basically hear:“We’re still burning coal, so it was a complete and total failure! B b both sides same.”
97% is great (though that is just for vegas) but it is still a long way from enough. Its a truism of availability that each 9 of uptime is more difficult to get to than the last, i.e. 99.9% is significantly more difficult/expensive than 99%
The problem here is that you cant simultaneously say “Solar is so much better than everything else we should just build it” and “we’ll just use other sources to cover the gaps”. Either you calculate the costs needed to get solar up to very high availability or you advocate for mixed generation.
None of which is to say that solar shouldnt be deployed at scale, it should. We should be aware of its limitations howver and not fall prey to hype.
What you do is get weather data for sunlight and wind. The two combine to cover some of the lull in the other. From historical data, you can calculate the maximum lull where neither are providing enough. Double that as a safety factor, and that’s how much battery you need.
Doing this is by far the cheapest way to get to 95% clean energy everywhere. That would be a total game changer.
The difficulty there is that there are a lot of places where you frequently get multiple weeks of both solar and wind at <10% capacity (google for dunkelflaute) that would need an implausible amount of storage to cover.
The OP article is already talking about 5x overbuilding solar with 17h of storage to get to 97% in the most favourable conditions possible. I dont see how you can get to an acceptably stable grif in most places without dispatchable power.
It’s not that bad. This is an actual technique in use, and it drastically decreases how much storage you need.
The biggest problem has been convincing capitalism to do it. They’ve been building solar like nuts because that’s the cheapest per MW of anything on simple Excel spreadsheets. More mathematical nuance would show that if everyone does this, it’s just going to cause overproduction and wasted potential on very sunny days. You need all three, and toss in some hydro and geothermal, as well.