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This battery farm, has a capacity of 900 MWh. While a typical nuclear power plant has a capacity of ~3000MW. So this battery farm is just... tiny. But solar po
by azurezyq 5y ago
This battery farm, has a capacity of 900 MWh. While a typical nuclear power plant has a capacity of ~3000MW. So this battery farm is just... tiny.
But solar power generation has a large potential for larger capacity, the shortest leg is energy storage.
So if something else can be used for base load (e.g., nuclear, natural gas, hydro), solar power works well for daytime peaks.
- ZeroGravitas 5y agoPlease try to sketch this out. Grab some daily production and consumption numbers from somewhere and then increase the nuclear (basically shift it straight up) and/or increase the solar (stretching upward is a rough approx but we can also flatten it) to levels that cover roughly 100% of demand. Look at the bit where both are running at the same time and compare it's area to the rest. Why is this duplicated "baseload" useful? Try it again with wind, which is much cheaper and faster to build than nuclear. The conclusion should be fairly obvious.
- azurezyq 5y agoIt's not difficult to accumulate enough capacity for solar / wind farms, I agree. But the problem is that we have not yet solved the problem of energy storage (as I said, it's tiny, compared to the capacity it can generates). So you need something to cover the night or windless periods. Did some search online and it seems that distributed wind farms may work as base load but I highly doubt it works anywhere due to seasonal winds. It definitely needs more research. Especially extreme weathers are becoming more frequent these years.