Solar Winter Storage Challenges

The challenging problem is not storing the electricity produced during the day to consume it at night, but to store electricity produced during summer to consume it during winter. At latitudes such as Paris, or London, or Seattle, or higher, the summer day is much longer than the winter day, and the rays come from an angle much closer to the vertical, they go through a thinner layer of atmosphere so the end result is that solar panels produce about 6 times more electricity. But people consume on

Just over build the solar. Build out solar so demand in winter is met.Use the excess power in summer for some kind of industrial use.

It's extremely rare to need to store months of energy at grid scale.Wind power works really well in winter as well as summer. In many places solar works sufficiently well in winter given the lower consumption levels due to lower air conditioning usage.

Winter being a problem really depends on location. Seasonal variability is much lower near the equator. Also batteries are becoming a solved tech. Also wind is anti correlated with solar, it's stronger in winter and at night. So you want 50-50 to minimize the need for storage.

Just build more solar. You generate excess electricity in summer and enough in winter. This isn't a problem.

During the winter, the solar panel are efficient just for a couple of hours every days. Meanwhile, this is the moment of the year where the global consumption is the highest. We've yet to see a battery system able to hold enough power to balance these months of under production.Why would you store electricity produced by Nuclear energy? You can adjust the production to match the needs.

My use case is Scandinavia. The summer has an absurd oversupply of sunlight (weather permitting). Capturing this for winter usage is the poser.

Summer to winter isn't a real storage case.If you need more energy in the winter, you build more wind power, not PV to store it an entire year.And episodes of little wind+sun have a duration of less than a month.And there are more storage use cases, e.g. short term grid stabilization (<1 second).

Available solar energy is significantly lower in winter. Additionally, heating typically requires more energy than cooling, so it is a double whammy. Solar alone cannot generate sufficient power without ludicrous over provisioning which would be wasted the majority of the year.

Do people use much energy during the day in winter though?At higher latitudes, the sun doesn't shine nearly as long, and the days are often overcast for weeks on end. Your storage needs to smooth over weeks, not hours!The cost of that storage, and the solar array, would be much higher than the nuclear plant.