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0 pointsacidburnNSA8y ago0 comments

Extremely. For instance, in Washington state, the BPA just had a 10-day wind lull. The 4 GWe of capacity was at a standstill. It would have taken batteries covering an American football field (with end-zones) 100 stories tall and costing $90B to fill that gap [1]. The mining and carbon footprint of that energy storage system would be very non-trivial. Pumped hydro storage is no good either due to biogenic methane in the reservoir.

[1] https://partofthething.com/thoughts/a-medium-length-primer-o...

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ZeroGravitas8y ago· 1 in thread

There's individual Nuclear plants of that size and the grid already needs to plan for those to be out unexpectedly (far less predictably than wind in fact) so it doesn't seems to be that big a problem in practice.

acidburnNSAOP8y ago

At this size (4GWe) it was no big deal, the hydro plants can cover easily. But at 50 or 100% renewables it's much more challenging because entire regions can go down unpredictably. The 1 GWe nukes go down for outages generally in a staggered way (though not always, for instance in a common-cause design concern)

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