Comment by ianburrell
12 hours ago
Solar and wind are good complements. Solar works during the day and best on clear, windless days. Wind blows best during the night and on cloudy, stormy days. Solar is best in summer and wind in winter.
Wind also works better in some areas that don't have solar. UK has a lot of offshore wind, but less solar. The US Northeast has a lot of wind but lags behind on solar.
Wind has dropped significantly in price over the decades and is competitive in price with solar. I saw article about early Scottish wind farm being upgraded so that one new turbine equals the whole old farm.
I theory yes, but grid storage favors solar. Solar can be placed much closer to consumption, literally on the roof of the consumer. Wind exists in large farms away from cities. They are not perfect partners.
The rich/old paticularly hate wind because they do not like looking at it. (The link to golf courses is not by accident. Wind farms and golf course tend to appear together due to them both gravitating towards areas with shallow waters.) We still here stories about blinking shadows interupting sleep cycles, even causing cancer. So perhaps we let them alone for another decade and allow solar+storage to take up the slack. Then, when the nimby people are no longer in power, we bring back wind.
(Shallow sea means no commercial traffic/ports. That means cheap land for non-industrial things like yacht clubs and big houses, which give rise to golf courses. So the rich/old dont like seeing the wind farms that, inevitably, want to live just offshore of their yacht/golf clubs. See Nantuket.)
None of the points you were responding to are “in theory”.
You are proposing something that sounds like killing the US wind industry and then simply bringing it back later. That probably would work well, especially when projects have development lead times of several to many years.
> grid storage favors sola
In what way?
> Solar can be placed much closer to consumption, literally on the roof of the consumer. Wind exists in large farms away from cities.
You still need the grid to exist, so 100 miles one way or the other doesn't affect cost very much.
> Then, when the nimby people are no longer in power, we bring back wind.
NIMBY never goes away. There are some situations where you don't want to burn up your political capital fighting them, but in general if you can get a project through then do it.
> I theory yes, but grid storage favors solar.
With solar you get to overbuild it and charge you batteries once a day. Wind has way more peaks and bottoms, so you can sell your battery capacity several times most days.
But the GPs point is exactly that you need fewer batteries if you have both. Fewer batteries tends to be cheaper than more, and this pair is a very common case.