Comment by kalleboo
8 hours ago
The nice thing is Sweden has lots of hydro, which works as natural long-term energy storage. Every bit of solar you generate means water is kept in the dam for use later in the year.
You also can't ignore wind power which should be part of any plan to "overbuild".
All of the discussions here conveniently ignore the existance of Wind. Which fortunately has higher yield in the months when there is less sun.
Yes, it's a mix. It's always a mix. Arguing that "renewables" = "solar" is a classic straw man.
So is comparing rooftop solar for a single property to grid solar for a country to a continent-sized grid of mixed renewable sources.
Battery and storage tech are barely getting started. Pumped storage is perfectly capable of smoothing out seasonal loads.
There's some capex for physical pumped storage - less than for a nuke plant - but once running it's comparatively low cost.
I think the amount of energy needed during wintertime would be difficult to cover with pumped storage or traditional batteries. You have to have suitable geography for pumped storage and also enough (fresh) water available for that. However, instead of water compressed air could be also used, but that has also problems.