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The sun does not shine every day. And not equally throughout all seasons. As the percentage of renewables increases so will the gaps on bad days/weeks. The dif
by the8472 7y ago
The sun does not shine every day. And not equally throughout all seasons. As the percentage of renewables increases so will the gaps on bad days/weeks.
The differences can be dramatic and must be compensated some way. https://www.energy-charts.de/power.htm?source=solar-wind&year=2019&month=1 https://www.energy-charts.de/power.htm?source=solar-wind&yea...
- ZeroGravitas 7y agoI'm familiar with the concept of seasons, just as I'm familiar with the concept of yearly boat trips. But lots of people live near the equator, just like lots of people don't really ever go for long drives so rather than focus on one particularly difficult case and then giving up I was looking for some kind of rough quantification of the problem. In analogy I'm just wondering whether the equivalent of the "daily commute" for most of the planet can be easily covered with current tech at a cost less than curent alternatives and we only need to worry about a comparitively small fraction that remains, which we could apply those savings to dealing with.
- the8472 7y agoEquatorial weather patterns are not all that relevant because most of the energy consumption is at higher latitudes which experience significant seasonality. And your daily commute/boat towing "analogy" is not really helpful because those problems are not comparable. Boat towing is an optional luxury and can be worked around at a slight inconvenience by visiting charging stations. Lack of long-term storage on the other hand can't be worked around, it requires double-spending to keep dispatchable fossil fuel plants in standby. And I don't think there is a dichotomy either. Variability exists on a continuous time-scale from seconds to seasons, so storage solutions can expand along that continuum.
- pfdietz 7y ago95% of the world population lives below 50 degrees N/S. And I suspect if seasonality really does become a problem that's costly to solve, heavy industry will move down toward the equator. Ship the finished products rather than try to make them where it doesn't make sense to.
- the8472 7y agoI intentionally wrote energy consumption instead of population because those distributions differ.
- SECProto 7y agoShort term solution: natural gas peaker plants could be repurposed to provide power during lulls in production (better than most fossil fuels, but very expensive and still produce greenhouse gases, so can't be the solution for long) Medium term solution: long-distance transmission, overprovision, and even more grid-scale storage (whole continents don't get cloudy & calm at once for long periods of time) Potential long term solution: space-based solar (power is 24/7, just need lots of landing locations + distribution, because microwaves are attenuated by atmospheric moisture) Edit: tl;dr is that for the issues, there are many potential solutions
- WanderPanda 7y agoWont introducing net energy to the earth add to the warming?
- esotericn 7y agoNot substantially. The issue is that energy that would normally escape does not.
- riffraff 7y agoI may be incorrect, but space based solar would catch energy that would reach the earth anyway, basically shading us. So it would probably be more or less adding the same energy, but sending it to the ground rather than dispersing some in the stratosphere.