Re:Activists who embrace nuclear power
by throwaway894345 on Sunday February 21, 2021 @05:29PM
(#26217942)
> in general there aren't times where both sun and wind are low production across wide areas.
I'm sure those times aren't common, but we need to have some answer for when they do inevitably occur. The recent Texas freeze was a once-in-a-century event and I don't think many consider that acceptable (and I would think that the no-sun / no-wind scenarios are more frequent than once-in-a-century). I'm sure someone has researched the amount of storage necessary, but the numbers I've heard from articles and podcasts tend to be in the days-weeks range--much longer than 4 hours.
Of course solar isn't operating at night, but wind keeps blowing.
One way to check this would be to find a wind farm that publishes their output over time. Looks like NREL has some good resources: https://www.nrel.gov/grid/wind-toolkit.html