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A comment on First new U.S. nuclear reactor since 2016 is now in operation. Parent comment

Re:First new U.S. nuclear reactor since 2016 is now in opera... by jodrellblank on Wednesday December 27, 2023 @05:48PM (#38787805)
Can you realistically overbuild solar and wind in a way that works in winter? Here's Terence Eden in the UK, and his graph of rooftop solar[1] showing peak around 400kWh/month in summer and trough around 50kWh/month in darkest December - that's a difference of ~8x which might be possible...

But that's averaged over the month, what about a run of December days with heavy cloud cover, misty foggy atmosphere, still air, maybe some Icelandic volcano soot in the atmosphere, what's the worst we'd have to plan for, and how much overprovisioning would that take?

[1] https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2013/02/solar-update/

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Re:First new U.S. nuclear reactor since 2016 is now in opera... by edent on Wednesday December 27, 2023 @06:10PM (#38788001)
FWIW I have updated stats at https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/04/3-years-of-domestic-solar-s...

They're also published as open data.

The dark and dreary days tend to be the ones with the most wind power. The tides around our coast are in constant motion.

But, the big challenge is still storage. Domestic solar panels provide 100% of our yearly electricity use. At the moment I can only store 4.8kWh of excess.

So we need to over provision and over store - hopefully both at the same time.

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Re:First new U.S. nuclear reactor since 2016 is now in opera... by ViewTrick1002 on Wednesday December 27, 2023 @07:36PM (#38788606)
Wind is anticorrelated to sun and stronger in the north.

https://globalwindatlas.info/en

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Re:First new U.S. nuclear reactor since 2016 is now in opera... by ggm on Wednesday December 27, 2023 @06:13PM (#38788023)
Same author: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/12/electricity-thats-too-cheap...
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Re:First new U.S. nuclear reactor since 2016 is now in opera... by ZeroGravitas on Thursday December 28, 2023 @06:29AM (#38792380)
In the UK, given it's northern latitude and great wind resources, you'd be best overbuilding mostly wind.

Here's a worked example based on real weather data that suggests a wind capacity of double peak demand and converting about 8% of all demand with power-to-X would be the the low cost option.

https://www.wartsila.com/energy/towards-100-renewable-energy...

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