Renewable Energy Intermittency

Because solar and wind are intermittent. UK for example had 11 days in a row in 2021 where wind farms stayed under 20% of capacity during Feb-March [1], the low-season for solar power and high-season in power consumption due to heating.At the national grid level, you should also want to account for rare, once-every-few-decades scenarios.[1] https:/&

It's always sunny somewhere, but if that is on the opposite side of the earth during the night, good luck building grid transmission.It's always windy somewhere, but that also might not be on the same continent as you need it.So if you don't like gas peakers or don't run a nuclear baseload you need to bridge those short non-windy winter days or weeks with batteries. Multiple nation scale terawatt-hour batteries. Which means millions of Tesla li-ion megapacks or millions

It is not an analogous situation at all and it is mainly due to the highly intermittent/variable nature of wind and solar.If I have to provide 100 units of energy (peak) a wind/solar farm that produces 100 units of energy (max) doesn't cut it. Solar obviously varies with time of day and doesn't particularly match actual demand curves. Wind is very unpredictable and can generate 0 units of energy when it is needed and 100 units of energy when it isn't needed. So you

'no sun and no wind' is not actually a thing that happens. What happens is less sun during the day and more or less wind in different places in Europe. This is a problem that can be solved through a combination of excess capacity, long distance transmission of energy, and storage, affordably and with existing technology. It's been obvious for a long time that a fully renewable grid can work, and Europe is rapidly moving towards that. Gas turbines are a reasonable stop-gap which wi

No generator runs 100%. Not so long ago the UK nuke fleet was managing only about 60% caopacity factor. The grid system runs as a whole with generators backing one another up. The last two big load shedding incidents (since the turn of the century, ~500k people had power cut to keep the rest of the grid up) on the GB grid involved thermal generators tripping; the older one was nuke+coal, the newer one gas+wind. And in general we know when the sun is going down a long time in advance so grid

What happens at night when solar and wind are not available?

How is this framed in the US? Solar (and wind) prop up grid that would have failed otherwise? Or the other way?

Countries are building lots of solar and wind. However, these techs only operate/run during the daytime or when the wind is blowing... which is not 100% of the time.If they continue to build out solar/wind and thereby drive FF-production "out of business" what happens when solar/wind cannot meet demand? Are they building stored energy reserves as well? What happens then?

the problem with wind and solar is not 99% uptime requirement. it's always sunny somewhere or windy. it's not like at one point in time the whole world will be covered in clouds with no wind at all.the problem is distribution the power over long distances.

This probably depends a lot on how close you are to the equator. Here in Germany output of solar in winter is negligible, and if there is no wind, which can happen for several consecutive weeks, we need a backup. No utilities company will build a fossil power plant that will be used only a few weeks per year, so our government will have to step in to make sure this happens.On top of this you have very high costs for an increasingly complex grid, which needs to be built and then maintained. Pr