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Earlier quoted context omitted.
The most striking thing is how incredibly flat the line for nuclear is.
Nuclear makes for great base generating capacity because it has an incredibly stable output, but that also means the line needs to be kept flat or tons of energy will be wasted.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same thought. It’s a bit of a bait and switch as the title implied to me a major milestone. But it’s not and the real milestone of renewables providing power continuously day and night remains.
running solar at night would be a real achievement!
“a specially designed photovoltaic cell could generate up to 50 watts of power per square meter under ideal conditions at night, about a quarter of what a conventional solar panel can generate in daytime”
The idea is to capture the energy that escapes into space when solar panels cool down during the night.
For a few minutes at low demand time. These kinds of over-grand claims are seriously harmful to the cause of promoting renewables because it makes it seem like we’re almost there and can stop caring. Just look at the excellent, accurate, and up-to-the-hour charts put out by the electricity market itself and you will see where and when the challenges we face still are. https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.…
Thank you, as a German paying absurd electricity prices I applaud this nuance.
for 0.25-6 h per day That's nice and all, but 15 minutes is a much lesser achievement than the headline implies.
For a few minutes at low demand time. These kinds of over-grand claims are seriously harmful to the cause of promoting renewables because it makes it seem like we’re almost there and can stop caring. Just look at the excellent, accurate, and up-to-the-hour charts put out by the electricity market itself and you will see where and when the challenges we face still are. https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.…
The most striking thing is how incredibly flat the line for nuclear is.
Nuclear makes for square supply curves which are kind of hard to handle, especially if you have a large percentage of your supply from a few reactors like they do in Finland.
For a few minutes at low demand time. These kinds of over-grand claims are seriously harmful to the cause of promoting renewables because it makes it seem like we’re almost there and can stop caring. Just look at the excellent, accurate, and up-to-the-hour charts put out by the electricity market itself and you will see where and when the challenges we face still are. https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.…
The headline on the original article seems unhelpful and perhaps deliberately misleading, but unless I’m reading the graphs wrong (quite possible!) this also doesn’t seem, like, a 15 minute window at 2 a.m. where unexpectedly strong winds created a temporary blip of excess production.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The most striking thing is how incredibly flat the line for nuclear is.
Nuclear makes for great base generating capacity because it has an incredibly stable output, but that also means the line needs to be kept flat or tons of energy will be wasted.
However, battery is improving the capacity factor of renewables; especially solar by allowing two things:
- when there's too much of it, you can charge batteries with energy that would otherwise be curtailed/wasted. - when there's not enough solar, you can discharge batteries.
Both effects help dampen peaks and dips in renewable energy supply and demand. I.e. it helps flatten the curve similar to what you point out is the case with nuclear. The first effect is often over looked: we are actively curtailing renewable energy that we don't know what to do with. People talk about shortages but not about surpluses. And that's actually a lot of energy. It also leads to the fallacy in believing that having lots of EVs increases energy demand when actually it also allows for better utilization of surpluses. Which dampens the impact this has.
Grids are bottle-necked on a lack of cable capacity. We have overproduction of energy in one region and shortages in another. Northern and southern Germany are a good example where on a windy day in the north, the wind energy can't get to the industries in the south that need it. So, they fire up coal plants. The same is the case in the UK where getting wind energy from Scotland south is a problem.
Cables and batteries help improve utilization of renewables. The main thing that drives these things is cost. Nuclear is costly and very slow to deploy. Realistically, any nuclear we don't have right now, won't be there for at least a decade or two. And that's if we would be really diligent about getting to that right now, which of course we aren't.
In the time until then, we'll be deploying solar by the TW/year. Same with batteries. And wind is also growing rapidly. And of course laying some more cables is a lot less controversial than building new nuclear plants. There has been quite a bit of talk of upgrading existing cables with better ones to effectively double capacity. This is even less controversial since the permitting is a lot easier and faster. In short, we'll deploy orders of magnitude more of all this than nuclear, and a lot earlier too. So much that nuclear might turn out to be a rounding error.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The most striking thing is how incredibly flat the line for nuclear is.
Nuclear makes for great base generating capacity because it has an incredibly stable output, but that also means the line needs to be kept flat or tons of energy will be wasted.
How do you mean?
Nuclear power plants can scale with demand. They're primarily steam generators and those feed turbines. You have many mechanisms you can use to control total power output in these systems.
In the sense that you're wasting fuel lifetime, to a certain extent, but I imagine that also varies with the level of reactivity currently allowed in the vessel by the control rods.
for 0.25-6 h per day That's nice and all, but 15 minutes is a much lesser achievement than the headline implies.
Agreed. But every step is worth celebrating. Next is 12 hours, after that a day and then finally months and years. Incredible progress is being made.