Comment by phil21

Pretending scheduled downtime and rare emergency shutdown of dispatchable power sources are the same as intermittent sources of power is getting to the point of a disingenuous argument. They are not remotely comparable, and they are typically not correlated outages. You simply overbuild these sources by a tiny percentage to account for such things - no one cares if 5% of your nuclear goes offline randomly. It’s not the same thing as 100% of your solar going away at exactly the same time.

Cherry picking Las Vegas - a desert - for solar is also somewhat silly. The midwestern US would be much more like a global average. I could also choose Alaska if you want silly arguments.

Seasonal also doesn’t mean seasons - it means seasonal in the mathematical statistical sense where every 5-10 years in a spot you get a week or two of both sun not shining and little wind output. No amount of overbuilding capacity will ever solve for that - you need energy storage or available dispatchable sources in the form of chemical, hydrocarbon, hydro, or nuclear.

The last 3% is almost all that matters when you are talking grid reliability for the masses and industry. Factories cannot operate without reliable sources of power, and asking every major consumer of power to have backup generation on-site is a massive amount of capital overhead. And completely untenable for perhaps 60% or more of residential consumers.

I’d love to be wrong, but watching everywhere that is getting close to solar and wind saturation is pretty telling. Basically every watt of solar at this point needs to be backed by a dispatchable power source or it’s going to end horribly. It’s great that we were able to replace burning fossil fuels when conditions are favorable - but we need to be real and recognize the costs involved here.

Investing in the natural gas power industry was the easiest layup I ever had investing since this was so predictable in the 2020-2021 green power delusion era. It was obvious to anyone that if solar projects went ahead as projected that natural gas was coming along with it.

I love solar and wind generation and want to see it spammed everywhere possible. I just hate the grifters that currently are endemic to it.