You can have your electricity share coming from renewable that is increasing, if in the end you have 30-40 of gaz/coal as a backup to handle the time when renewable is not producing you'll no go way further. Example: Germany.
https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy12osti/53504.pdf
My favorite fun fact on this is that regular old nuclear plants can ramp up at down quickly, at 5% full per per minute! Most people don't know this. They often choose to not due it because fuel is a small fraction of their operating costs, but in a low-carbon capacity markets they could really shine. French and (previous) German reactor do it all the time.
https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/reports/2011/load-following-npp...
> however, these impacts are modest compared with the overall benefits of replacing fossil-fueled generation with variable renewable generation
Being backup generation implies that you will optimize for the minimum possible capacity factor. Nuclear can't deal at all with low capacity factors.
Germany made a huge sacrifice by subsidizing early and very expensive Solar to in a northern country to really kick things off. But they’re stilly paying subsides on those early installations.
Most areas in California, maybe.
> This is why the percentage of solar is exploding world wide while nuclear has stagnated.
No, solar is exploding because it's heavily subsidized, either monetarily or by other schemes like net metering. Nuclear has stagnated because it requires huge upfront cost, and stability in building new capacity.
Look at a globe some time, most of the world is much closer to the equator than Germany yet battery backed solar still beats gas/coal/nuclear in parts of southern Germany.
PS: Nuclear, coal, and natural gas also receive plenty of subsidies. It turns out removing all subsidies from electricity production actually pushes wind/grid solar even harder. What it discourages is rooftop solar which isn’t a good fit for many locations.
As to PA, this time of year demand is very low as you need minimal heating or cooling. Similarly while solar output is low in stormy weather wind isn’t. Similarly the region has plenty of hydroelectric which can offset production from days with high wind/solar production to days with low wind/solar production.
Weather tends to be a tradeoff where hydro and wind improve just as solar and demand decline. In extreme cases like Washington state batteries are pointless and the ideal mix changes.
This is the real problem with renewables. You need to 20-30x them to get to real usage. Or have 100% redundant gas coverage, with giant political problems coming with it.
It also has 12.5GW of PV because it’s still a cost effective location for solar power.
You don’t get anything in seconds, but over years you just pay people to build them and they build factories just like you pay people to build equipment for other types of power plants.
New limits always show up with new scales. People will advocate dramatically scaling nuclear as if tens of thousands of people with the skills to operate them are sitting around with nothing to do. Lack of skilled workers is actually a larger limiting factor for nuclear than the few years it takes to build a single reactor and one of the reasons they can’t make a significant difference without at least a decade of lead time and more likely several. Current programs can teach people reasonably quickly, but you need not just students but more people trained to teach the material.
Sounds like a win/win.
However, at 5AM it was bad - wind was only on 5%, zero solar.
By the way, I'm not arguing that all is well and everything is solved, I just hate this juvenile argument of "but what if it's cloudy and there is no wind for weeks", because that does not happen often, especially not on a continent-wide grid with lots of offshore wind power in one of the windiest seas in the world.
This isn't a once in a while issue that can be solved with a few batteries. We need revolutionary grid-scale storage tech to make renewables work. Current batteries are orders-of-magnitude too expensive and we have orders-of-magnitude too little manufacturing capacity.
Let's ask Mark Jacobson from Stanford what his modelling shows: https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/21-U...
I find this very hard to believe. There was never a windless night all year? Not for an instant?
This[1] seems to disagree. There were plenty of times when wind + solar generation was 3GW or lower, where total usage was over 50GW.
If you look at all the electricity generated over the whole of 2022, about half came from renewables. But the grid doesn't operate on averages. Every load needs an instantaneous generation to match. And Germany regularly had times were wind + solar couldn't even meet 10% of demand.
[1] https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c...
In reality renewable contribution might be even higher, unless there is correction for this.