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Comment by 99_00 | Hacker News Reader

Why aren't power outages in California and Europe partly due to the adoption of solar and wind?

The average duration of power outages in Germany has been on a steady decline over the last 15 years [1]. The fraction of electricity generated from renewable sources has increased from around 10% to over 40% in the same period of time [2].

[1] https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/DE/Sachgebiete/Elektrizitae...

[2] https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/themen/klima-energie/erneuerb...

Which outages?

That would be politically inconvenient.

No, that would be using solar as a scapegoat for bad planning.

What do you mean by bad planning. Are you talking about planning that is flexible and responsive to pick up the slack. For example, a high demand day that is cloudy and not windy?

I am talking about designing a grid to be robust, and has enough spare capacity to handle difficulties without failing catastrophically.

For critical infrastructure, you design for worst-case scenarios, inflate the safety margins, and make backup plans (like a plan to gracefully degrade service).

Failing this and cutting corners is what I would call bad planning.

It is unfortunately true that intermittent sources of power generation subtract from grid stability. Texas (ERCOT region) had a huge incident back in 2019 with rates skyrocketing to $9/KWh for over 90 minutes. Many attributed this to an over-reliance on wind generation.

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