Comment by strawhatguy
21 hours ago
just looked at 2, using their own numbers, and it says 97% to 24/365, in a sunny area (Las Vegas), which is like an outage 43 minutes out of every day (24 * 0.03 * 60).
That's not what many would consider as 24/365, and certainly not "every hour of every day".
That's greater uptime than your average coal (85%), nuclear (91%) or gas (95%) power plants... https://www.nrdc.org/bio/rachel-fakhry/myth-247365-power-pla...
This, like normal power plant outages, is fine because in reality the entirety of your power does not come from one specific place, from a specific type of power. Instead we load balance over different places using the grid, and energy sources. It's much much rarer to have an extended period of cloud cover and no wind than an extended period of cloud cover, and an extended period without wind. Compound that with "over the entire electrical grid" and it doesn't happen.
And as a worst case version where the geographical and types-of-power constraints exist... e.g. if you're planning an off grid facility which is too small to justify wind power... backup generators exist.
> That's greater uptime than your average coal (85%), nuclear (91%) or gas (95%) power plants...
It really doesn't matter what the uptime of individual power plants is. What matters is the uptime for the consumer which is essentially 100% in EU countries.
The report mentions this:
> Las Vegas can reach 97% of the way to 1 GW constant supply.
My take away from the report is not that 24/365 is achieveable everywhere, but how solar + batteries is rapidly dropping in price and is now cheaper with other forms of generation, which will result in solar + batteries making up the majority of generation on the grid.
> In a sunny city like Las Vegas, the estimated Levelised Cost of Electricity (LCOE) at this 97% benchmark is $104/MWh. This is already 22% lower than the $132/MWh estimate based on global average capital costs of solar and battery a year earlier. It is also more cost-effective than coal in many regions ($118/MWh) and far cheaper than nuclear ($182/MWh).
I guess, but this article seems misleading to me then. The percentages do seem to mean to constant 1GW supply, not a total supply.
So what’s the total supply?
LV is ~9 Gwh per day (3.3Twh year according to internets), so 23ish Gwh does seem promising, but they don’t have near that much solar I don’t think.
I guess Im more skeptical, especially when this is coming from a single purpose advocacy group. They just shut down that solar thermal electric plant after all. While that’s different than photovoltaics I know, it’s also true no grand plan survives implementation.
If we got to 97% and use gas backups or whatever, we have already clearly won.
The point is that a very mundane setup with small storage is nearly enough to create a flat baseload of electricity.
We both know that neither supply nor demand is that flat.
In reality we can also trivially add wind power, existing hydro, gas turbines ran on carbon neutral fuel etc. to the mix.
How will you force this house that is self-sufficient 97% of the time to buy extremely expensive nuclear powered electricity to not crater the capacity factor of the nuclear plant?