> Why do you consider this important, rather than the aggregate output of all of them together?
It's important in term of national grid design: we have a grid designed to push large amount of power from a single areas to many consumers, not ones designed to move amps around a country... It's not hyper-important especially respect with the variability of the output who impose hyper-quick generators to compensate oscillations quick enough to keep the grid on, but it's still relevant because it strain the grid significantly creating locally problematic frequency perturbation.
> As you say later, you've got PV on your own roof. If everyone in a small city does that, it's the same output as a nuclear plant, if they do that with a battery pack each (and I add a caveat about installation costs which I'm told are needlessly high in some places such as the US) then it can also be the same cost and reliability as a nuclear plant.
So far it's only in my garden, having a east-west root, but the real issue is that I'm FAR from being autonomous... To be almost autonomous (witch means no grid usage most of the year) I'll need something like 200kWh storage with the needed p.v. to recharge at least 40kWh in 3-4 hours + supply in the same amount of time enough peak power to run most home appliances like 3kW (absorption) heat-pump to quickly heat enough water to pass the rest of the day, night and new early morning in cold winter days, +5-6kW of various home appliances (dishwasher, washing machine, ...) to been able to very quickly do most high power usages in few hours of sunny days in winter dedicating the rest just to basic self-consumption to strain batteries the minimum possible and passing the night with no more than 15% daily DoD. That's means something impossible in essentially all EU cities (too dense) and possible only for some not-so-small homes around the EU south. Nothing more.
Oh, if I add H₂ to the game, something not on sale so far and then something I can't add anyway no matter how much money I put on the table, the price and needed equipment skyrocket even more... Perhaps in France just 2-3% of total population can do something like the only lithium + p.v. + hot water storage. All the rest can't economically and most of them even physically constrained by their homes and terrain sizes.
> What Uzbekistan push? What are the rioters supposed to do with any of this?
http://intellinews.com/sun-drenched-uzbekistan-on-the-verge-... or https://thediplomat.com/2022/08/solar-energy-project-leaves-...
something similar happen in Australia https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/bold-steps-needed-to-power...
Azerbaijan https://bbj.hu/economy/energy/green-energy/hungary-joins-aze... and others sunny and not much inhabited lands... All with similar plots.
> What Desertec scam?
http://www.desertec-uk.org.uk/reports/DII/DPP_2050_Study.pdf Desertec was, partially is, since partially was founded and some little PP was made, by a classic private-public mafia-aggregation ranging from major Germans banks, Siemens, ABB, Cevital, ... others from energy sectors, even the Morocco's Royal funds and others big names from Ignacio Campino, Fritzhjof Finkbeiner, Hassan bin Talal etc so far they have created some plants, mostly eolic, in western Sahara with a series of abuse on local population and polemics about the real usefulness of the project.
> I have no idea what this is trying to say.
Essentially that so far already-made and functioning p.v. plants have produced intermittent energy at rates well below the peak power in means. Like you have a 100MWp or a 5kWp plant, normal daily production is well below the 100MW or 5kW nominal power. For instance today my peak p.v. power was 4355W for few seconds. Most of the day I was below 3kW. That's what I'm try to say in my poor English: you can't count real power on the sum of p.v. modules peak power.
> What do you mean "how does it count"? It's a significant contributor to the global electricity supply.
We need to keep 50/60Hz in the grid. That means if we have let's say 5GW p.v. in a country during a sunny day that country still need at least 2.5 or more GW classic power plants on-line ready to compensate p.v. production variation. Of course they do not produce actually 2.5GW but to be ready and quick enough they need to be powered on and that's means they consume gas/coal etc or they are NPP and in that case there is no point in lowering their production to use p.v. since they cost the same used at full power or left in stand-by.
> Given lithium batteries are the most expensive storage option, and despite that cost it's still something close enough you're unsure about, and it's still getting cheaper, why are you so pessimistic?
So far they are the only realistic option on sale, except pumped hydro witch is not something domestic, and they have MANY issues and limits. The biggest is their limited operational life compared to their costs. You can't discharge daily more than 10-15% of the battery if you want to hope it will last around 10 years. You need to regularly fully charge the battery to balance cells, but in that case you need something, like the grid, to reject cyclic overvoltages when a load drops and the battery/p.v. inverters are not lower their production fast enough or you strain the battery anyway (similar problems for BEVs, you need to charge them 100% regularly but also need to consume a bit before drive or accept the loss of generative breaking (witch means in practice "the engine break" if you have a long descent for instance, and still strain the battery a bit when you lift the foot on the accelerator...). Even with 10% DoD/day, overvoltage rejects to the grid (CC included, something not very legal in some countries) etc you lost 1.something% a year of battery capacity.
Do you really think we can produce let's say 40kWh battery for let's say 5k€ maximum, for most homes (at least) of a country in few years + the relevant recycling when they EOLs + all the batteries needed for EV etc? I honestly doubt. It's far more likely to build many NPP in far less time.