Day time.
And what of the night?
Freeze in the dark.
And what of the night?
Freeze in the dark.
Or pumped storage. Or lifting a really heavy thing and letting it fall slowly.
Or retaining an amount of fossil fuel capacity to be turned on during peak consumption and sun and wind dips while still focusing on renewables and storage with the goal to reduce the duty cycle of peaker plants to zero.
I challenge you to run the numbers on this.
Or at least read or watch someone who has.
Whenever you’re certain you know the answer, it behooves to try to prove yourself wrong.
Unsurprisingly, gravity is an extraordinarily weak force. It merely appears otherwise because the total mass of the Earth is literally astronomical at around the 5.9722×10^24 kg mark. Concrete blocks hanging from a crane, much less so.
Don’t believe me.
BIY - Believe It Yourself here:
https://youtu.be/iGGOjD_OtAM?si=FXjjxz4NLbA-oj7U
Pumped hydro is a nonstarter: do you see any suitable geography anywhere? Yep, they’ve already been dammed damn it. So approximately no one^ can have their existing hydro upgraded to pumped hydro retro fitted to pumped, and have the surrounding landscape covered in solar and wind.
How helpful!
Chemical batteries? South Australia has a decent sized one. I think it can power some of the state for about 12 seconds.^^
^okay, not no one: Hydropower accounts for approximately 15%, but you have to choose pumped hydro sites where it also makes sense for wind and / or solar, so it’s clearly not an answer for everyone everywhere. Not even close.
^^hyperbole! I know. Look, it’s actually around 1–1.5 hours, which is statistically closer to my estimate of 12 seconds than anything actually useful like a day or a week.
eg: (old page, project is now complete and working as planned): https://www.westernpower.com.au/resources-education/network-...
Niagara Falls, to the unaware, uses pumped hydro during night and off-season to account for power dips for when tourists want to look at the waterfall.
For the chemical batteries section, that’s an endorsement: Australia built a system that can handle grid-scale charge and discharge! At this point it’s a matter of buying more batteries and sticking them in, a resourcing problem rather than an engineering one.
Nuclear? Gas and coal peaked plants?
We can at least plan for an eventuality that is likely to happen. How much planning is/was there when gas suddenly gets cut off?
Nuclear.