5x overbuild won't be enough, as I mentioned elsewhere at least in TX its not unusual for the wind to be producing at less than 15% of rated capacity. Particularly in the winter/summer when the energy load is at its highest.

So, like the 8% production two weeks ago, you need a 10x overbuild _just_ to reach rated capacity consistently. And you probably need some kind of long term storage as well for when it really goes bad.

There is a huge difference between slow to dispatch (coal/nuke/etc) plants which take hours to come up to full pressure, and simply not having anything that can come online (solar/wind) for a predicted weather event.

> 5x overbuild won't be enough, as I mentioned elsewhere at least in TX its not unusual for the wind to be producing at less than 15% of rated capacity. Particularly in the winter/summer when the energy load is at its highest.

Unless TX has a median load factor of 100% (in which case, wow), 5x overbuilding on top of median load factor definitely works in the case you describe.

As far as I know, the typical wind average load factor is 33%. So over-scaling by 5x of that would mean that 7% is still enough to provide. Granted, that's not a very large margin to the 8% you mention, but Europe is bigger than Texas, so it's less likely to have such a low-wind event.

Your just restating (or not understanding) what I said, the average is misleading because its seasonal, which isn't even clear unless you look for it in the graphs (because they swing). edit: (and I should be clear, its still swinging when the daily average is 5%, it might say produce 8% during the evening but only 2% during the day).

Here look at whats going on:

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/expanded-view/cu...

You will have to tweak the graph because I didn't spend the time to figure out how to create a link to a graph which isolates just wind, and then expands the time-frame out to an entire year.

If you do that, what you see is during the summer the lulls are much lower and last for much longer. AKA it might go for a week or two basically not producing anything. It happens at other times of the year too, but during the spring/fall the weather is changing faster (aka its less stable) and the running average goes up.

This is what the wind/solar people seem to refuse to understand, its not a simple averaged calculation over a year because the worse case is much much worse for storage and capacity. The wind blows at 5% nameplate for two weeks, and the amount of storage and overbuild required to bridge that makes it an order of magnitude more expensive than pretty much every other source. Made massively worse because in say TX, that is also when energy consumption peaks.

There is median 29 hours of sun during December in Poland. The daily amplitude means nothing here.

Yet we build 10GW of capacity, that mostly does not contribute towards lower coal usage.

And, wind capacity factor is usually very low.

You'll notice that I mentioned over-scaling wind, not solar. I'm not a fan of solar overall, except maybe some clever big projects like using deserts, and for personal self-sufficiency (where people would over-scale a lot).

I don't mind keeping building solar panels, but subsidizing requires proper analysis of the benefits and externalities (notably on the grid) rather than blindly giving money to anyone saying !SOLAR! like we currently do.

Solar in deserts will shortly be recognized as a very dumb idea.

Solar on reservoirs and in pastures will be recognized as an overwhelmingly better idea.

A dollar spent on solar displaces several times as much carbon as anything else except wind, even after accounting for night and weather.

Wind capacity regularly drops below 10% in Poland. https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/PL

You only need to overbuild the total energy requirement + the inefficiency cost of H2. Then you generate + store H2.

What do we do when there is no wind?

If there's a continent scale lack of wind in Europe I would be more afraid about the general state of our sun.

Try find a windless day here.

https://www.windy.com/?50.345,6.328,3

You mean like half of 2021? https://theconversation.com/what-europes-exceptionally-low-w...

Thanks for the article, I didn't know climate models estimated EU will have less wind, I expected we would get more wind.

That being said, the article is pretty low on numbers. The only actual number shown is -32% in UK. Which can totally be overcome by having 5x overproduction in whole of Europe.

We of course need to overbuild. You can do x4 for off shore wind and still come out ahead of nuclear. That map also corresponds to the time of year solar works 16 hours per day in Europe. It also shows that France Italy and the eastern part of the Baltics had more wind than usual.

Wind capacity regularly drops below 10% in Poland. https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/PL

Poland is about the worst country in the EU for on-shore wind so a very cherrypicked counter example.

Do you have numbers for off-shore parks along the Baltic coast? That would be much more interesting.

Again... what do you do, when there's no wind along the baltic coast? Even a single windless night? Do you turn peoples power off, until it starts blowing again?

Wind on the north sea? Or northern Baltic? Or Swedish or Norwegian hydro? Or alps based hydro?

We are talking about a continent scale grid.

If we'll be fully dependant on other countries for our energy this will never pass. Energy independency is a must.

So I presume you are for Poland to exit the EU also? I am not talking about relying on Russia here.

Why, does it forbid energy independency somehow?

And what's wrong with idea that we shouldn't freely give other countries leverage on us?

> in whole of Europe

was presumably the answer to that. Now of course one does need a proper analysis of weather patterns (wind+sun) over the whole of Europe over the long term to know how well it would actually work. But it is a fairly large area.

In a world of increasingly broken supply chains, insane inflation, and gross materials shortages, I would never be hypothesizing about over-building anything.