4 ms·
> Fengning is less than half the cost of a nuclear plant and delivers twice as much power. But the issue is not power but storage capacity. Fengning has 40 GWh
by zajio1am 4y ago
> Fengning is less than half the cost of a nuclear plant and delivers twice as much power.
But the issue is not power but storage capacity. Fengning has 40 GWh of storage capacity, that is less than day of production of basic 2 GW nuclear power plant.
For countries in central Europe (or even northern Europe, like Finland), solar production during winter is generally negligible so from renewables you are left with wind energy. There are multiple-day periods of no wind, so just to keep 3 days of wind energy to replace one continuous 2 GW nuclear power, you would need ~3.6 Fengnings.
- pydry 4y agoPeriods of high wind tend to coincide with periods of low solar and vice versa. That negligible solar tends to coincide with the very highest wind production. Offshore also tends to anticorrelate with onshore wind. Diversity of wind and solar production already takes a huge chunk out of variability. Variable/surge/nearly free pricing would take another huge chunk of storage requirements as easily time shifted demand is matched to production (car charging, aluminum smelters, heat pumps, etc). With 2.5 days of pumped storage you're probably covered for about 4 years out of 5. Those 10 day wind lulls happen 1 year out of 10 in summer and 1 in 25 in winter.
- Paradigma11 4y agoWe do have historical weather data, so there should be no reason to guess if a certain amount of storage is sufficient. I would be far more positive on renewables plus storage if people could point to studies that given this grid, storage, energy production and weather data that would have happened during that time period in that area.