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A comment on It can make more sense to build new renewable capacity than run old coal plants. Parent comment

Re:It can make more sense to build new renewable capacity th... by ip26 on Thursday November 07, 2019 @03:02PM (#21476774)
Among other things, when it gets really cheap you can start over-provisioning. Cloud cover sometimes cuts the solar irradiance in half? No problem, just build twice as much solar capacity (and maybe add a HVDC transmission line to the next state over for the high production times)

Wide deployment & interconnection will also erase some of the local variability of, e.g. a cloud passing over.

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Re:It can make more sense to build new renewable capacity th... by keanzu on Thursday November 07, 2019 @07:03PM (#21478792)
Land use of solar prevents it ever getting really cheap. According to the UK solar power portal [1]: "If solar covered one percent of the UK it would meet the country’s entire power demand".

> just build twice as much solar capacity

This would increase the land use from 1% to 2%. That's a huge amount of the country to give over to power production.

[1] https://www.solarpowerportal.co.uk/news/if_solar_covered_one...

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Re:It can make more sense to build new renewable capacity th... by pjc50 on Friday November 08, 2019 @06:28AM (#21481376)
It's a reasonable fraction of total roof area, I believe.

But the real problem with the UK and solar is not nighttime but seasonality. No, we need to keep going with the wind buildout and not drop the tidal energy programme.

We're getting there: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jun/21/zero-carbon...

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Re:It can make more sense to build new renewable capacity th... by esotericn on Friday November 08, 2019 @07:22AM (#21481586)
The UK has a lot of unused land on a percentage basis.

Granted, half of that will be in Scotland and ideally your solar would be further south, but even then, you're probably talking about switching less than 5% of the arable land to solar.

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Re:It can make more sense to build new renewable capacity th... by ourlordcaffeine on Friday November 08, 2019 @04:21AM (#21480895)
Overprovisioning in the case of the UK really applies to wind rather than solar.
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Re:It can make more sense to build new renewable capacity th... by kortilla on Friday November 08, 2019 @03:51AM (#21480795)
Does the UK not experience night time?
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