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It's not cynicism, it's understanding capacity factors and how difficult large scale storage is. If solar panels have a capacity factor of around .25, which is
by netflixandkill 6y ago
It's not cynicism, it's understanding capacity factors and how difficult large scale storage is. If solar panels have a capacity factor of around .25, which is what we're seeing in real installations worldwide, then it is necessary to overproduce by at least 4x and store it somewhere for off-peak solar production hours.
It's even worse if there is not other dispatchable generation available unless people are willing to accept periodic blackouts.
We're in the process of building out a combined solar and battery installations in Guam, which is about the ideal case with predictable weather, predictable load, little heavy industry and low potential for load growth. It'll enable them to retire all their old fuel oil generators, but they'll be keeping the diesel/LNG plant for at least the next 30 years even if they only run it a few days worth of time every month.
- toomuchtodo 6y agoThat Guam use case would be perfect to trial combined desal and hydrogen production and storage for production troughs instead of keeping the diesel genny. Saltwater and renewables goes in, clean water and hydrogen come out.