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Comment by s0rce

2 years ago

That seems unrelated to the batteries, couldn't a storm damage the coal plant?

Yes a storm could damage the coal plant with some small probability. But now you have replaced the coal plant with batteries + solar. Solar will be disabled by every large storm due to cloud cover. The grid will certainly be less reliable.

  • Solar isn’t disabled by every storm. You get some power even at maximum cloud cover and storms only last so long.

    Further it’s generally offset by increased Wind power and decreased AC usage, and can be further compensated by increased hydroelectric generation.

  • Seems like a good case for using wind or wave power which would presumably provide max power during a storm when solar provides less power. Of course, I suppose a bad storm could also damage these forms of energy generation as well.

More likely that it would affect electricity cables and knock out power in a lot of areas. But that would be true regardless of the power source.

Batteries, like coal plants should be pretty resilient. Wind turbines should be mostly fine as well. The Chinese actually have lots of off shore wind and seasonal typhoons. You can expect some percentage of turbines to need maintenance after that probably. But overall it should be fine. Solar panels basically produce less power with cloud cover. And if they aren't mounted properly there might be some storm damage. But otherwise, that should be fine too. Hail would be a bigger challenge than wind. There were some reports of freakishly large hail stones destroying some solar panels a while back.

Mostly, having a lot of decentralized power generation in the form of wind turbines and solar panels all over the place is a good idea from a resilience point of view.