Two days ago there was a storm that damaged some generators and left the batteries very low that they resorted to rolling blackouts, as there was not enough electricity for the island.
https://www.hawaiianelectric.com/update-rolling-oahu-outages...
https://www.hawaiianelectric.com/update-rolling-oahu-outages...
Further it’s generally offset by increased Wind power and decreased AC usage, and can be further compensated by increased hydroelectric generation.
It will depend on what kind of storm are we talking. Depending on wind speed, wind turbines may need to lock their gearboxes to avoid falling apart.
But arguably yes, increased wind power before and after a large storm perhaps.
This is incorrect for several reasons first we care about Wind + Solar + Hydro not Solar alone.
8X % reduction in solar over 15 minutes sure, but track full days output and it’s not 90% across the full day. Similarly you rarely see 100% of theoretical output over a full day, so it’s really the delta between expected output and minimum output that matters.
Also, you don’t build exactly as much generation as you would need assuming 100% output every single day. That’s just as true for Nuclear/coal etc as it is Solar / wind. Redundancy has a cost, but it can effectively guarantee a surplus.
You can have prolonged periods of abnormal weather. As an example, across Europe we had months of extremely low wind in 2020:
https://theconversation.com/what-europes-exceptionally-low-w...
Ie: Lots of solar when the wind isn’t blowing
Not always. Over months of low wind, there will still be overcast days, and of course, there's that pesky little issue of the night.
The only question is if you can charge in the day not if there’s clouds at night.
Batteries, like coal plants should be pretty resilient. Wind turbines should be mostly fine as well. The Chinese actually have lots of off shore wind and seasonal typhoons. You can expect some percentage of turbines to need maintenance after that probably. But overall it should be fine. Solar panels basically produce less power with cloud cover. And if they aren't mounted properly there might be some storm damage. But otherwise, that should be fine too. Hail would be a bigger challenge than wind. There were some reports of freakishly large hail stones destroying some solar panels a while back.
Mostly, having a lot of decentralized power generation in the form of wind turbines and solar panels all over the place is a good idea from a resilience point of view.
> It literally did not coincide at all, given that the coal plant in question closed in September 2022.
You simply don't get it. You're oddly requiring the bad storm happen soon after the plant was closed down for there to be a connection, which is obviously not the case. One can take an action which creates a vulnerability that takes some time to finally cause a problem.
You're saying something as silly as: the removal of the bolts holding in the emergency exit plug did not cause the hole in Alaska Airlines flight 1282, because the door didn't fly off immediately after the bolts were removed.
The original lack of capacity was caused by two malfunctioning units in a thermal plant. The capacity from this coal plant could only have allowed for one more failed unit.
Weak correlation if any.