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Originally Posted by sendler
Why solar needs storage to replace fossil fuel or nuclear fired electriclal generation: The Topaz solar farm has been running for a few years now so there is some good long term data. It is operating at 25% of it's rated capacity because solar by nature will be either weak or off most of the time as the sun goes over.
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But electrical grids have to be stable. So if solar and wind want to replace fossil fuel, they have to have enough storage to make up for the down times. I like heavy rail/ gravity storage.
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Conversion efficiency of different methods was never brought up. The 25% factor of Topaz is the on/ off time. It would be like saying a gas or nuclear plant was broken 75% of the time
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Coal fired and natural gas plants operate at 47% capacity on average
Does that mean they need storage?
Oil fired plants are only up 8% of the time, do they need storage?
Base load plants are increasingly becoming unprofitable because they make electricity when none is required
The old idea of making baseload plants that supply 100% of needs 100% of the time is a failing logic.
It is costly and wasteful to idle a plant all night when it's not designed to quickly ramp on or off.
Ideally solar, wind, hydro + natural gas should make up the gap between the base load and the increasingly sporadic peaks and valleys of the real load.
As people's behavior changes the peak demand window becomes more chaotic and incompatible with the old baseload idea.
In my mind MSR would be great but solar should be advanced as should wind, but we need to use common sense, don't underestimate regulatory inefficiency causing grid inefficiency.
Further that half of every large scale power plants energy is wasted, that heat could warm most everyone's home and business for the cost of piping water.
We are drowning in waste at every turn of our power grid.
For me, in another 5 years I will be off grid due to nissans e bio fuel cell coming to market.
I have all my energy needs mapped and with solar in the mix I can go off grid profitably, if I can do so at a lower cost per kwhr in Wisconsin of all places it just shows how piss poor we are at managing resources, not that the tech is invalid.