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Comment by alan-crowe | Hacker News Reader

That depends on where you live.

If nuclear power is trying to match a fluctuating load it needs storage for a day or two, to escape the Xenon dead time. But solar power for air-conditioning only needs an hour or two of storage to bridge from peak solar at noon, to maximum demand mid-afternoon.

On the other hand I live in Scotland. Solar power for space heating needs to save the summer sun for six months to heat homes in January. Ouch! Adding a day or two of storage to a nuclear power plant is much more practical.

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If the energy you need is in the form of heating, it’s actually surprisingly viable to store energy for months. Heat batteries is probably the cheapest and easiest way to store energy for the long term. It’s just that it’s horribly inefficient to go back to electricity.

So it’s more of an issue when you want to use that excess solar to power your computer in winter.

If not nuclear, I think the northern regions need to focus on geothermal (Quaise?) and trash burning (yes, recycle first, but eventually everything non metal degrades and should be incinerated)

I mean, Scotland has more wind power than it can use (or transfer to England) at the moment, so solar is probably not the main focus. The price of nuclear plants also means you can afford to overbuild renewables by quite a lot to make up for seasonal variation and still come in at the same price.

The problem is still long periods (up to weeks) of single-digit percentage of nominal capacity of power generation from wind farms. Overbuilding doesn’t help much, so a non-renewable option still needs to be available.

Wind droughts lasting a week or more are a 1-in-5 year event in the UK so, yes, must be accounted for.

Nuclear is prone to similar issues - statutory outages for inspections and refuelling, and emergency outages which often affect multiple plants at the same time (eg. a cracked steam valve in one plant requiring remediation on the same component in the others).

Keeping existing gas generators around, ready to be put into use when needed, is the simplest way of dealing with this until sufficient storage capacity is built out.

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