Comment by Animats
2 days ago
> I don't think you will find a day where there is no sun and no wind in all of europe.
For the US PJM (US east coast and midwest) and CAISO (California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada) grid areas, total wind power fluctuates over a 4:1 range on a daily basis. Both grids post dashboards where you can see this. Averaging out wind over a large area does not help all that much.
Solar fluctuates too; there's not much at night.
This largely means we have to build a bit more of each, and store some.
The chances of an entire continent being devoid of wind and solar for an extended period becomes vanishingly small pretty fast.
There is a paper floating around showing that for both US+Canada and the continental EU there has never been a single hour where there has been no wind and no sun somewhere in a 30 year period.
> There is a paper floating around
This needs a better cite.
1 reply →
Here's the CAISO wind graph. This is the total wind energy from four large states. Note that the low point is 1/7 that of the peak, which is around noon.[1] Here's the PJM wind graph.[2] Low point is about 1/4 the peak, again, around local noon.
It just doesn't "average out" across even a sizable country.
[1] https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook/supply
[2] https://dataviewer.pjm.com/dataviewer/pages/public/wind.jsf
Now click the demand view.
It goes dramatically up and down on a daily pattern, too.