Comment by asdfadsfgfdda
1 year ago
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.
From solar panels that we track at my organization the solar generation decreased by ~90% at 90% cloud cover. Cloud cover isn't the most important metric, it's irradiance, but still a good indicator and so yes, in a storm the power generation will drop by atleast 90% probably
> in a storm the power generation will drop by atleast 90% probably
This is incorrect for several reasons first we care about Wind + Solar + Hydro not Solar alone.
8X % reduction in solar over 15 minutes sure, but track full days output and it’s not 90% across the full day. Similarly you rarely see 100% of theoretical output over a full day, so it’s really the delta between expected output and minimum output that matters.
Also, you don’t build exactly as much generation as you would need assuming 100% output every single day. That’s just as true for Nuclear/coal etc as it is Solar / wind. Redundancy has a cost, but it can effectively guarantee a surplus.
> increased Wind power
It will depend on what kind of storm are we talking. Depending on wind speed, wind turbines may need to lock their gearboxes to avoid falling apart.
But arguably yes, increased wind power before and after a large storm perhaps.
Modern turbines can adjust the angle of their blades to extract less energy from the wind. There’s always tradeoffs so people still chose maximum wind speeds based on the area. But, we’re talking being near the center of a hurricane not just storms at that point.
> storms only last so long
You can have prolonged periods of abnormal weather. As an example, across Europe we had months of extremely low wind in 2020:
https://theconversation.com/what-europes-exceptionally-low-w...
“The beautifully bright and still weather may have been a welcome reason to hold off reaching for our winter coats, but the lack of wind can be a serious issue when we consider where our electricity might be coming from.”
Ie: Lots of solar when the wind isn’t blowing
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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.