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199 comments on The Energy Return of (Industrial) Solar - Passive Solar, PV, Wind and Hydro (#5 of 6)
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199 comments on The Energy Return of (Industrial) Solar - Passive Solar, PV, Wind and Hydro (#5 of 6)
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You'll need a cite on that. Note that the 15-20% as stated was intended as a total of generated electricity, not nameplate capacity. so *if* you got lucky and on a specified day produced 40% of your energy with wind, it would still not necessarily have met the conditions for 15% penetration. Wind installations have a typical capacity factor of 25% so to get 15% total energy, you'd have to install 60% of your nameplate capacity.
In addition to that, europe has an overarching grid, in which the fraction that is wind is *far* below the 15% threshold. to point at germany or spain is comparable to stating that nebraska generates X% and neglecting the cross-border flux.
You're wrong about "the main thing" too, the data is important, yes, however you need to *have* the backup generation capacity and the grid capacity to carry the overage/underage from production to load. To fail to factor for that is to lie about the realities. It's true that below certain thresholds, you have no need to factor for those, but that's where the 15% comes in (which is still more than 10 times current world installed base, so there's obviously no need to put the brakes on anytime soon).
Well, here The Age mentions a 27% period for a week, though,
And here we see that on April 18th this year they managed 32%.
You speak of getting "lucky" and having days where the generation fraction is high, but it's not luck. It's about putting the turbines in the right place and having accurate weather forecasts. It's like saying that being a good commercial fisherman is "luck" - it's not, it's knowledge and experience and judgment combined with some forecasting.
Once again, overall penetration is 9 percent, which means that spain is still far below the 15-20% threshold. It also means that on the "jackpot" hours, wind should provide something in the neighborhood of 36% of spot energy. That is in fact *exactly* my point.
If you were to install 20% then on a jackpot day you'd be generating 80% and would need to either shed load or idle some older baseload plants that are unlikely to respond well to being power cycled. In addition, the German windfarms have effectively proven that you would still need to have schedulable plants and fuel reserves capable of meeting the full demand assuming that you are getting exactly 0 from your windmills. Those days will happen too, statistically, for every second that ALL your windmills are generating at full, you will have a second where none of your windmills are doing anything. Taking the jackpot moments as cases of the strength of wind power is to neglect the bust moments, and those are just as critical.
Your insistence that it's all information is simply wrong, it's information and infrastructure, and as total wind penetration grows, the infrastructure needs grow with it. Now, an HVDC line running from northern Norway to southern Spain via Germany *might* allow penetration all along that corridor in excess of the 15-20%, due to the geographic diversity, but simply taking spain in isolation and neglecting the subsidy from french nuclear is seriously biased math.
It's also worth noting that the equivalency is 1000, 4 mw wind turbines for each 1 gwe nuclear plant. Since I have never seen a windfarm containing more than 10, 4 MW turbines, that means that you will need 100 mountaintop style sites (or an offshore rectangle 8 miles on a side at 1/4 mile separation) to replace the energy produced by the Nplant.