I am well aware of the limitations, was merely pointing out that renewables could greatly improve the status quo when it comes to resiliency for a large portion of the population. And the extreme latitudes can still benefit from solar in the summer. It mostly just comes down to cost/benefit tradeoffs.
It seems like the parent comment was suggesting that natural gas was a necessity. I whole heartedly disagree. For winter months in extreme latitudes, other forms of renewables (hydro, geothermal, wind, biomass) should be sufficient.
Solar and Wind are not feasible for European winters, because they are backed up by natural gas. Where that natural gas comes from? Well Russia.
You need energy storage first, which does not exists, because it is too expensive to build it. So therefore there is going to be no dominance of solar and wind clearly from practical reasons.
Yes you can build more wind and solar but people need power also during the dark and sometimes windless winter months. Storing enough power isn't currently feasible so it's basically either coal, gas or nuclear.
Most of what's south of switzerland or north of estonia has decent local weather for it. Finland's resources are quite good compared to even some equatorial places like PNG, just with higher seasonal variability. It's more the central part + UK. The point being that latitude is less important than weather, and as such claiming that solar is untenable in northern US or southern canada because it's merely okay in england is an obvious lie.
All of which is not to say solar won't be more important than gas, coal or nuclear in central europe going forward. Just that wind will take the front seat.
ERCOT's projections would have covered grid needs but for the failure of natural gas and coal plants. So let's talk about that.
Not solar, not wind. Comparing current production to idealized mid-summer production is nonsense. ERCOT's own projections never involve wind maxing out in wintertime, because that's not how anything works. If we were to become 100% reliant on wind for some strange reason, we would obviously need to build much, much, much more wind power for the winters. Which is why we have so many other sources of power. Solar and wind were never expected to keep my house warm, coal and natural gas were. And coal and natural gas fell over and died when it was needed most.
i edited that into my comment while you were writing yours, yeah. norway and finland have capacity factors of 6% for solar (compared to 30% here and 21% in the usa) and north of the arctic circle you'd need enough batteries to power you all winter long (though if i did my calculations correctly, it turns out that total yearly insolation rises after you cross the arctic circle)
this is why scandinavian countries are using a lot more hydro and wind than solar. wind and especially hydro are cheaper even than solar, but wind and especially hydro are much more limited resources
still, consider a counterfactual where somehow norway had to satisfy all its energy demand from solar. they burn 78.8 million barrels of oil per year, which is 15.3 gigawatts. they consume 124.29 billion kilowatt hours of electricity per year, which is 14.18 gigawatts (already over 95% hydro and wind, with no significant nuclear or solar component). they burn 3.98 billion cubic meters of natural gas per year, which at .0364 megajoules per liter is 4.59 gigawatts. all of these together (assuming no overlap) are 34.1 gigawatts, and over 5.55 million norwegians, that's 6.1 kilowatts per norwegian. (if that sounds like a lot more than your house uses, that's probably more because most of it is used by transport and heavy industry than because norwegians have to heat their houses more.)
34 gigawatts divided by a 6% capacity factor is 570 gigawatts of solar cell nameplate capacity you'd need. at 02021 german costs of €0.60 per (nameplate, peak) watt of utility-scale solar, (including modules, inverters, permitting, inspection, customer acquisition, etc.; see slide 48 of the fraunhofer deck linked above) this would cost €340 billion, about 8 months of norway's gdp. if you could only spend 5% of their gdp on the transition, you could get it done in about 15 years, maybe 25 if you need batteries
of course it's unnecessary because norway is already renewables-powered! but my point is that solar cells are now so cheap that they're a viable power source even in ridiculously polar countries. incidentally, they now cost half what they did in 02021, so the price would be a lot less now
antarctica is much more interesting than the arctic, though, since there's land there
I wasn't saying you yourself were against renewables. Rather your argument seemed to imply that building one big peaker plant would preclude the demand for renewables since the peaker could supply the entire load all the time.
I don't think we'll ever have "enough" solar+wind to supply base load, since night exists and winds calm down. Talking about "renewables" as a group doesn't really make sense. For example hydro is highly consistent and highly dispatchable, but waterfalls are rare.
Spitballing, I would think cooling (especially with California's coast where it's rarely needed) would have much higher variability than heating, since people seem to tolerate a wider range of higher temperatures compared to colder temperatures. At least from personal experience once I enable the heat for the year it mostly stays that way, turning on when it gets even a degree too cold. Whereas air conditioning is a question each day of "can I get by with the windows open", and only when the answer turns out to be an unequivocal "no" do I turn on the AC (which then runs continuously to make up for lost time).
Some balance of 4 things - wind is stronger in winter, overbuild solar, import solar, seasonal storage like hydrogen. But clearly it's preferable to be near the equator and not have to deal with that issue.
The problem is still severe. In a country the size of the US it is still possible for there to be days of very little wind across the whole country. And, of course, once the Sun goes down on the West coast there won't be any power coming from solar for many hours. Which means that in a worst case scenario you need to rely on nuclear, coal, or hydrocarbon based power generation. And it means that you can't avoid having to build out conventional power generation capacity to match peak loads (which can occur when solar and wind power production is effectively zero).
The technologies I like provide solutions to the hard problems.
In Finland, the coldest weather is experienced when, during winter months, there is a persistent anticyclone parked overhead. Those can cover the entirety of the country, and inside them there is negligible wind. For example, on 8th of December it was -20°C, and the average output of wind power (nominal installed capacity ~2800MW) over the day was 330MW. The average output of grid-connected solar was <1MW (It's December in Finland, what did you expect?).
Anticyclones can remain in place overhead for weeks. The value often used to calculate the cost of renewable+storage is 3h. This is a reasonable value for California, where solar production correlates well with use. If you built the grid in Finland based on that, we would just die when it gets cold.
There are no renewables that work well in Finland. Water power is fully built out. Solar only produces power when we don't need it. Wind reliably does not provide power when we need it. Compared to renewable with enough storage, even with all it's overruns, OL3 is remarkably cheap.
Presumably nat gas and coal can perform fine in cold weather as they are major sources of electricity in northern climes that get much worse weather much more often.
I was more commenting on the gap in the articles logic that suggested wind/solar was off the hook because nat gas went down worse. I really don’t know the systems well enough to fill that gap on my own.
I was not saying we have to be all on renewable perfectly. We are too far from even reaching a reasonable level. Power generation at night is dominated by coal plants.
The linked article is interesting, and it kinda confirms what I was wondering that it is probably wind farms that we need way more, not solar.
Fair, I meant 'intermittent' when I said 'renewable'. Geothermal and hydro are very different since they can be relied upon for the most part. Hydro sometimes has issues with water levels, which may be exacerbated by climate change.
That's the other baffling part about advocating for solar/wind grids. We're anticipating major disruptions. Why would we want to be MORE exposed to climate change?
I think you’re being glib, but the issue is that you can’t guarantee the alignment of sun and wind to match demand. Sometimes the wind blows at night, yes, but sometimes it does not. On a pure renewable grid, no wind at night means rolling brownouts or blackouts. This is particularly problematic during the summer when people want to run AC in order to sleep, and will also be an issue when people move to electric heat in the winter.
Long term we’ll use a mix of big grids, over provisioned renewables, and grid level storage to smooth this out, but we’re not there yet. Right now the choice is between a nuclear power plant during these moments, or a natural gas one.
The challenge is just having enough raw capacity to meet demand using intermittent renewable sources. Weather varies on the scale of days/weeks, and winter is cold because of limited sunlight. What energy source will we use to stay warm all winter?
It seems like the parent comment was suggesting that natural gas was a necessity. I whole heartedly disagree. For winter months in extreme latitudes, other forms of renewables (hydro, geothermal, wind, biomass) should be sufficient.
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