Quote:
Originally Posted by Big Dave
MechEngVT has it. It is the intermittent nature of wind and solar that doom them. To back them up you have to run a fossil fuel plant in wasteful "spinning reserve" to cover for when the wind or solar units drop the ball.
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Not quite true: you can float some intermittent generation (I've seen numbers up to 30% of total) on the system, basically because you have to have spinning reserve on the grid anyway. Then there's e.g. hydro, where you have a degree of choice about how much water you'll let out at any given time. And of course your system control operators are juggling all the various supplies, trying to get the cheapest electricity while staying within system guidelines... (At one point in my career, I used to maintain the some of the powerflow & stability programs that the utilities used to plan all this.)
There are potentially much better ways of storing energy than pumped storage, hydrogen, or exotic battery chemistry. High-speed flywheels, spinning in a vacuum on magnetic bearings. Very little conversion loss, and little friction loss over periods of a few days. Put a unit like that in every house that has PV panels, add a smart controller, and you could add quite a bit of solar/wind to the grid.