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> and the fact that cycles of power generation in most cases do not align with usage. This is false. Power usage everywhere is highest when the sun is shinin

> and the fact that cycles of power generation in most cases do not align with usage. This is false. Power usage everywhere is highest when the sun is shining. There are also very very few places where solar power ever causes the market to bottom out with any regularity. Note that there is no technical problem with this- you can always just disconnect renewables from the grid. The phenomenon you are thinking of -the duck curve- refers to the power demand after subtracting solar. The daily peak consumption of power in many places is wider than solar generation, so if there is enough solar you end up getting new smaller peaks just after dawn and around sunset. This is minorly inconvenient for non-renewable sources, which prefer to have more predictable demands. > Usually most analysis ignore costs of having a buffer in the system Correctly! Non-renewable plants are the ones that need buffer. Solar, wind, hydro etc can all be connected to a grid with zero instability- you just unplug them if nobody wants the power. Non-renewable plants have slow ramp speeds- they need the buffer in order to follow a changing load. > Not to mention less land required, which is another of ignored costs. This is incorrect; I don't know of any analyses which don't include land and interconnection costs which are obviously substantial. If you mean more intangibly... that's very silly. The US Interstate system is 3.9 million miles of road, with 60' medians, 16' of shoulder, and 48' of lanes. 237,250 square kilometers. The "blue square"[1] is 10,000 square km. The amount of land we spend on parking lots absolutely dwarfs it. > Because nuclear is superior by every metric Nuclear has not gotten cheaper- why would it? It's a big clockwork. We are not better at building pipes than we were 80 years ago. Solar has and will continue to: plants get more productive, panels get thinner, efficiencies go up. There is no grounding principle that indicates nuclear can be cheaper, and it certainly is not in practice. Solar is far cheaper than coal by capacity much less kWh, and nuclear plants are more complex than coal. What indicates that a 500 MW nuclear plant should be cheaper than a 500 MW coal plant, not counting running costs? > Are they? Demonstrably yes, absent weird conspiracy theories. Renewable installations keep opening at much lower costs than traditional plants. [1]: https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/energy/2015/05/21/fact-checking-elon-musks-blue-square-how-much-solar-to-power-the-us/ https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/energy/2015/05/21/fact-checking-elon...

sofixa 1y ago
> This is false. Power usage everywhere is highest when the sun is shining While the biggest peak is around midday, the second biggest is in the evening (most people are home, cooking, watching TV/listening to music/playing video games/etc; or in restaurants, clubs, cinemas, etc) which, depending on location and time of year, can easily be after sunset (e.g. half the year in the Northern hemisphere for sure). You still need enough power to cover that, especially if it has been a cloudy/rainy day, or week, or month. > Non-renewable plants are the ones that need buffer. Solar, wind, hydro etc can all be connected to a grid with zero instability- you just unplug them if nobody wants the power. Non-renewable plants have slow ramp speeds- they need the buffer in order to follow a changing load And this is so easy and foolproof to do, just check out the Iberian power outage.
- hwillis 1y ago
  > You still need enough power to cover that, especially if it has been a cloudy/rainy day, or week, or month. That's besides the point! The window of highest demand completely covers the window of solar. You can build a LOT of solar before storage starts becoming cheaper than just building more solar. You only need storage if it's ALL solar- you can have a majority of your power supplied by solar with hardly any storage! There this idea that if you overbuild solar that power will have nowhere to go, or something- you can just turn it off. You use backup power for the non-shining hours and you're totally fine. > And this is so easy and foolproof to do, just check out the Iberian power outage. In fact I did[1]. Page 117: "In fact, in most of the network nodes analyzed, there is no correlation between voltage stability and the amount of solar generation or the amount of coupled synchronous generation" They had 2.3 seconds of inertia, more than the regulated 2 seconds. Power sloshing through interconnects caused plant ramp rates to be overwhelmed one-by-one, causing the cascading failure, because they had no buffering. If they were all solar or wind plants, the failure would not have happened! [1]: https://media.licdn.com/dms/document/media/v2/D4D1FAQGcyyYYrelkNg/feedshare-document-pdf-analyzed/B4DZeBtlohGsAk-/0/1750227910090?e=1750896000&v=beta&t=uEftse3BPsTjdLQ3DmjoVkadhUGqf7-MfYj_6UnSS28 https://media.licdn.com/dms/document/media/v2/D4D1FAQGcyyYYr...
rich_sasha 1y ago
> > and the fact that cycles of power generation in most cases do not align with usage. > This is false. Power usage everywhere is highest when the sun is shining. This is kind of true but also not. In Poland, and in a lot of Europe, power usage is by far the highest in winter, day or night, for residential heating. That's also the time with little sun: days are short and the sky tends to be heavily overcast. Sunny weather is rare in winter.

sofixa 1y ago

> This is false. Power usage everywhere is highest when the sun is shining While the biggest peak is around midday, the second biggest is in the evening (most people are home, cooking, watching TV/listening to music/playing video games/etc; or in restaurants, clubs, cinemas, etc) which, depending on location and time of year, can easily be after sunset (e.g. half the year in the Northern hemisphere for sure). You still need enough power to cover that, especially if it has been a cloudy/rainy day, or week, or month. > Non-renewable plants are the ones that need buffer. Solar, wind, hydro etc can all be connected to a grid with zero instability- you just unplug them if nobody wants the power. Non-renewable plants have slow ramp speeds- they need the buffer in order to follow a changing load And this is so easy and foolproof to do, just check out the Iberian power outage.

hwillis 1y ago
> You still need enough power to cover that, especially if it has been a cloudy/rainy day, or week, or month. That's besides the point! The window of highest demand completely covers the window of solar. You can build a LOT of solar before storage starts becoming cheaper than just building more solar. You only need storage if it's ALL solar- you can have a majority of your power supplied by solar with hardly any storage! There this idea that if you overbuild solar that power will have nowhere to go, or something- you can just turn it off. You use backup power for the non-shining hours and you're totally fine. > And this is so easy and foolproof to do, just check out the Iberian power outage. In fact I did[1]. Page 117: "In fact, in most of the network nodes analyzed, there is no correlation between voltage stability and the amount of solar generation or the amount of coupled synchronous generation" They had 2.3 seconds of inertia, more than the regulated 2 seconds. Power sloshing through interconnects caused plant ramp rates to be overwhelmed one-by-one, causing the cascading failure, because they had no buffering. If they were all solar or wind plants, the failure would not have happened! [1]: https://media.licdn.com/dms/document/media/v2/D4D1FAQGcyyYYrelkNg/feedshare-document-pdf-analyzed/B4DZeBtlohGsAk-/0/1750227910090?e=1750896000&v=beta&t=uEftse3BPsTjdLQ3DmjoVkadhUGqf7-MfYj_6UnSS28 https://media.licdn.com/dms/document/media/v2/D4D1FAQGcyyYYr...

rich_sasha 1y ago

> > and the fact that cycles of power generation in most cases do not align with usage. > This is false. Power usage everywhere is highest when the sun is shining. This is kind of true but also not. In Poland, and in a lot of Europe, power usage is by far the highest in winter, day or night, for residential heating. That's also the time with little sun: days are short and the sky tends to be heavily overcast. Sunny weather is rare in winter.