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Originally Posted by Duffman
The numbers I have seen are duty cycles of 30 and 20% respectively for wind and solar. The only thing reliable that you can say for either one of them is that reliably you can predict there will be no solar power during the night. There will be times when neither is worth a damn and their duty cycles suggest that it will be more times than you think.
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When neither is worth a damn? Have you even though about that? Solar is perfect for the increase in day time generation. It's
output profile is more or less spot on with demand during the day. Depending on location we then need to fill in the demand it cannot handle with output from a combination of other renewables, such as wind and geothermal, along with dispatchable sources just in case we do need their output such as pumped hydro and biogas.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Duffman
To get it to work you need Wave and Geothermal to emulate the performance of our current thermal supply. Is there enough of both to replace our current thermal supply, because as James points out, they are small units and our big thermal plants are about 1000MW. This also speaks nothing to whether or not a particular site is a good location for either technology. Same for Hydro, really the hydro is there or it is not, Germany with less than 5% hydro was not endowed with those resources plain and simple.
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We only need those wrt average baseload, solar already follows the demand profile.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Duffman
We will always need peaking plants, right now they are Hydro and Gas, if you have no hydro, then you are pretty dependent on gas. Can we make enough BioGas? We know right now we can’t make enough ethanol to meet our needs, why would we think we can cover additional bases as well.
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Did you watch the link? Germany made use of significant pumped hydro for dispatchable output as well as energy storage for when demand isn't up to supply. As a percentage of output, we have more hydro than germany, so odds are we'll need fewer biogas plants, however we have plenty of feedstock for biomass gassification if need be.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Duffman
This is not a problem of taking 4 or so sources of electricity, summing up their W*hours and saying that it meets the avg need over a years worth of time. Supply must equal demand at every single second of the year or the system doesn’t work properly.
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No one is talking about simply matching current generation MW for MW. Go check out what they've done in Germany, they were matching the grid's output compared to demand ni real time given some representative renewable mix, not just comparing the average output of renewables to conventionals.
