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This article and blog series appears to primarily focus on fossil fuel plants failing in extreme weather events (which are growing more frequent). This is an im

This article and blog series appears to primarily focus on fossil fuel plants failing in extreme weather events (which are growing more frequent). This is an important dimension to track, but isn't directly comparable to "normal" reliability - ie, how much storage do you need to keep your 100% wind+solar+hydro mix providing all your typical energy needs through a typical night (for example). Also, I don't particularly think these articles make great arguments. For example, "Similarly, 56% of the generating capacity knocked offline came from gas plants during Winter Storm Uri". Texas' overall energy capacity mix is ~40% gas. So while yes, it is disproportionate, I don't think it's hugely so, especially without taking into account other factors - for example, typical solar capacity in winter. The blog post that actually starts digging at some numbers (https://blog.ucsusa.org/mark-specht/how-reliable-are-gas-power-plants-what-icap-ucap-and-elcc-tell-us/ https://blog.ucsusa.org/mark-specht/how-reliable-are-gas-pow...) indicates that we might expect gas plants to have a reliability of ~70-80%. From another blogpost from them, we can find a very rough estimate of solar/onland wind reliability of ~30-40% (measured in ELCC, same as the 70-80% figure above) https://blog.ucsusa.org/mark-specht/elcc-explained-the-critical-renewable-energy-concept-youve-never-heard-of/ https://blog.ucsusa.org/mark-specht/elcc-explained-the-criti... So it's important to take into account the reliability derating of gas plants, but it doesn't really change the fact that solar/wind are in a significantly different class of reliability compared to gas plants.

_aavaa_ 2y ago
> So while yes, it is disproportionate, I don't think it's hugely so, especially without taking into account other factors - for example, typical solar capacity in winter. I would say that it is an important point, don't know if I'd go so far as to say huge. The argument that gas plants are a stable baseload which cannot be supplanted by renewables is undermined if they're disproportionately affected by such events. I agree that they're in a different class, but I don't think that reliability is the right word. I think dispatchable is much closer to the way I understand you using it. Solar and wind don't have a capacity factor of 100% since they harvest energy rather than produce it from fuel, so as the trite meme goes "the sun doesn't shine at night" so you'll need some sort of plan for how to handle the lower output during the winter and at night (i.e. storage, overbuilding, larger grids). Fossil fuel plants for the most part (they can become bottelnecked by gas pipeline capacity if all your heating is all off natural gas) has a lower capacity factor due to malfunctions or maintenance. All that to say, I agree with you that wind and solar are not a 1-1 replacement for fossil fuels. I believe that the future is going to leverage their cheap costs when their available[0] rather than try to re-create the current system which evolved due to different constraints. [0]: Different time of using pricing, larger and more responsive grids, and energy/heat storage (Rondo Energy).

_aavaa_ 2y ago

> So while yes, it is disproportionate, I don't think it's hugely so, especially without taking into account other factors - for example, typical solar capacity in winter. I would say that it is an important point, don't know if I'd go so far as to say huge. The argument that gas plants are a stable baseload which cannot be supplanted by renewables is undermined if they're disproportionately affected by such events. I agree that they're in a different class, but I don't think that reliability is the right word. I think dispatchable is much closer to the way I understand you using it. Solar and wind don't have a capacity factor of 100% since they harvest energy rather than produce it from fuel, so as the trite meme goes "the sun doesn't shine at night" so you'll need some sort of plan for how to handle the lower output during the winter and at night (i.e. storage, overbuilding, larger grids). Fossil fuel plants for the most part (they can become bottelnecked by gas pipeline capacity if all your heating is all off natural gas) has a lower capacity factor due to malfunctions or maintenance. All that to say, I agree with you that wind and solar are not a 1-1 replacement for fossil fuels. I believe that the future is going to leverage their cheap costs when their available[0] rather than try to re-create the current system which evolved due to different constraints. [0]: Different time of using pricing, larger and more responsive grids, and energy/heat storage (Rondo Energy).