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Comment by troupo | Hacker News Reader

Right now it's a calm night, so ~25% comes from hydro storage[0], 22% from hydro, 18% imported from Spain [1], and 16% from gas.

I find these "x % is now renewable" useless without looking at actual numbers, and how they work not just in the best of cases.

[0] Didn't know Portugal had this much hydro storage

[1] Spain right now is 37% gas, 23% nuclear, 17% solar, 12% wind

Edit: data from https://app.electricitymaps.com/map

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I doubt Spain is 17% solar... As they are essentially same sun availability.

You think it's too much or too little? Sun availability didn't matter much in Spain until recently, as the country finally got rid of the "sun tax" that limited the development of wide-spread solar panel usage. Essentially, even if you used solar panels, you'd be taxed on every kWh produced, even from your own solar panels. Luckily, they got rid of it, so probably the development will ramp up a bit from now on.

It seems surprisingly high for night time production. As I think original comment was about momentary production.

I was surprised, too. Data is from https://app.electricitymaps.com/map, so could be quite inaccurate

I somewhat suspect the data. Could be that there is some inaccuracies and it is also from earlier point of time

The time of the data is written there (right under where it says Spain)

As of this moment it says 19:00 and 3% of electricity, which was before sunset, it was probably an hour or more earlier, and sun has been especially strong today.

Better data for Spain in 2022:

    Solar: 11.5%
    Wind: 22.7%
    Hydro: 6.6%

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?coun...

It's not better data because it shows data in aggregate.

Spain has some heat-the-molten-salt power plants which continue to produce electricity after sunset.

> You think it's too much or too little?

When it's night in Portugal, it's night in Spain :-)

Spain has quite a few solar plants that generate power even at night.

Right now the latest data is from 20:00 and it says 3.3% so when the comment above was made, the sun was shining a bit more.

(But I think the sun goes down a bit earlier, but there are also the canarian islands as part of spain, way further south and west of the mainland)

Probably the difference in solar installations.

Portugal is on the Atlantic coast so has more wind and rain. A lot of inland Spain is pretty arid, making it ideal for solar.

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