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Because solar and wind are intermittent. UK for example had 11 days in a row in 2021 where wind farms stayed under 20% of capacity during Feb-March [1], the low
by Zanfa 4y ago
Because solar and wind are intermittent. UK for example had 11 days in a row in 2021 where wind farms stayed under 20% of capacity during Feb-March [1], the low-season for solar power and high-season in power consumption due to heating.
At the national grid level, you should also want to account for rare, once-every-few-decades scenarios.
[1] https://reports.electricinsights.co.uk/q1-2021/when-the-wind-goes-gas-fills-in-the-gap/ https://reports.electricinsights.co.uk/q1-2021/when-the-wind...
- ben_w 4y agoSure, but one of the two options in this report is to halve the battery requirement by building five times as much PV, for an overall cost increase of 20%.
- Zanfa 4y agoI think the report suggests building 5x capacity of the current electricity consumption, not the final consumption when heating and transportation have also been converted over from fossil fuels.
- ben_w 4y agoThe main page talks about both, starting with the two options I stated for just electricity after 10 years, and making everything else also renewable after 15. (On the one hand, if you can build that many batteries, fully electric transport is fairly easy; on the other, I don't think there's a plan to ban fossil fuelled cars soon enough to actually hit fully electric transport 15 years from now, but that's probably an unimportant quibble on this scale of change).