3 ms·

To add, I see down at the bottom people fighting over "consistency". Wind power is almost always producing something. This production can be statistically mode

To add, I see down at the bottom people fighting over "consistency". Wind power is almost always producing something. This production can be statistically modeled. Thus, you can overprovision wind and say that on average, your target of <x> MW is met or exceeded <y> percent of the time. So wind, if planned well, doesn't really need big storage. Baseload generation is also a fallacy. It only matters that demand is met. Wind has already become the "baseload" in the UK in that wind operators always undercut everyone else on the market, thus displacing other generation. Baseload demand is the point which demand never falls below. Back in the age of coal, it made sense to meet this baseload demand with large baseload plants, that were big and did not change output and gained economies of scale. One challenge that I think people overlook in the shift to renewables is grid frequency stability. Big thermal plants have heavy rotors that have a lot of inertia, stopping the grid frequency from changing too quickly in an imbalance. Replace these with inertia-less wind and solar, and you will need another solution for grid stability.

sremani 7y ago
>> Wind has already become the "baseload" in the UK Give me another place in Europe where Wind is more abundant than UK ? https://globalwindatlas.info/ https://globalwindatlas.info/ Putting wind mills in Greenland and Arctic may produce a whole lot but bringing it to population centers is an issue. Base load is a bitch, UK is the best case scenario enjoy it.
telchar 7y ago
Solar may not have inertia, but wind turbines certainly do. It's hard to imagine one of those stopping on a dime. Smaller batter installations can also help with frequency stabilization. The Tesla installation in South Aus primarily serves the purpose of grid stabilization rather than bulk storage, for example. I think solar needs that stabilization and storage more than wind, it's probably important to have a diversity of sources and locations with renewables to keep any one source from having too large an immediate impact on the grid. You're absolutely right about baseload being a fallacy. I would argue that balancing the grid is probably an easier problem in the absence of big constant baseload generators like nuclear, than with them. With renewables providing baseload generation, there is more capacity for variable renewable sources; if these can be sufficiently decorrelated (by geography, type of source, even design of e.g. turbines) then they would have a high likelihood of averaging out to support baseload needs while having greater backbench dispatchable capacity at play. You might only need to overprovision by (making up numbers here) 1.5x rather than 4x to have sufficient dispatchable capacity than if you combined say, nuclear baseload with renewable peaking. The aggregate effect of this would be making the renewable sources cheaper per nameplate Wattage.
pjc50 7y ago
Frequency stability was discussed recently in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20973513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20973513 The wind farm tripped unexpectedly easily .. but apparently this can be solved with a software update. As and when we start rolling out batteries they are excellent for frequency response, and are already getting paid for that purpose in some places.

sremani 7y ago

>> Wind has already become the "baseload" in the UK Give me another place in Europe where Wind is more abundant than UK ? https://globalwindatlas.info/ https://globalwindatlas.info/ Putting wind mills in Greenland and Arctic may produce a whole lot but bringing it to population centers is an issue. Base load is a bitch, UK is the best case scenario enjoy it.

telchar 7y ago

Solar may not have inertia, but wind turbines certainly do. It's hard to imagine one of those stopping on a dime. Smaller batter installations can also help with frequency stabilization. The Tesla installation in South Aus primarily serves the purpose of grid stabilization rather than bulk storage, for example. I think solar needs that stabilization and storage more than wind, it's probably important to have a diversity of sources and locations with renewables to keep any one source from having too large an immediate impact on the grid. You're absolutely right about baseload being a fallacy. I would argue that balancing the grid is probably an easier problem in the absence of big constant baseload generators like nuclear, than with them. With renewables providing baseload generation, there is more capacity for variable renewable sources; if these can be sufficiently decorrelated (by geography, type of source, even design of e.g. turbines) then they would have a high likelihood of averaging out to support baseload needs while having greater backbench dispatchable capacity at play. You might only need to overprovision by (making up numbers here) 1.5x rather than 4x to have sufficient dispatchable capacity than if you combined say, nuclear baseload with renewable peaking. The aggregate effect of this would be making the renewable sources cheaper per nameplate Wattage.

pjc50 7y ago

Frequency stability was discussed recently in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20973513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20973513 The wind farm tripped unexpectedly easily .. but apparently this can be solved with a software update. As and when we start rolling out batteries they are excellent for frequency response, and are already getting paid for that purpose in some places.