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No, you just need peaker plants which can run for the 1-3 weeks per year when there is no wind in the winter. Battery capacity will never be built to exceed 1-
by oezi 3y ago
No, you just need peaker plants which can run for the 1-3 weeks per year when there is no wind in the winter.
Battery capacity will never be built to exceed 1-3 days of demand.
- mnw21cam 3y agoAnd because they are run so infrequently, they don't need to be fancy or efficient - just cheap and powerful. It's easier than one might imagine, but it helps if you think of scale along the lines that horsepower is roughly comparable to kilowatts, so a 200 horsepower car engine (which is small) can provide 147kW, or enough power to supply around 147 houses on average (depending on a lot of things obviously - in a climate with high heating/cooling demand it won't manage as many houses). It's not uncommon to have single diesel generators capable of generating 4MW of electricity running around on train tracks.
- gwright 3y agoSo you need to have two generation systems. Certainly possible, not cheap. I assume in this conversation that we want: * reliable power * affordable power If you relax those assumptions you open up the solution space. It isn't clear to me how much you can relax those assumptions though.