Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- Utah isn't a power grid.
They're on the western interconnect.
Combined solar and wind are about 25-30% of production there.
These articles about individual states are trash.
by buckle8017 - good thing the President is pouring billions into restarting coal plants
what a freaking horror show we are living in
by ck2 - Paid article by solar-energy lobbyist.
- by toomuchtodo
- Vaclav Smil would be quick to replace the word power with electricity in the title of this article. It is why Germany can say renewables supply 56% of its electricity while renewables supply only about 21% of its energy. The rest of energy generation won't quickly be replaced with renewables: diesel and kerosene moving freight and people, natural gas in furnaces and boilers, coke reducing iron ore into steel, methane feeding the reactors that fix nitrogen to make fertilizer, and coal that turns limestone into cement.
I am fully on board with renewables! I have just found Smil's perspective quite useful here.
by grahamerwin - Also true for California for quite some time.
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/california-solar-...
What's going to happen in the future is that May will be a month of extreme electricity abundance, with a good chunk of the electricity just not being collected at all because the grid doesn't need it, and it will be cheaper to have unused electricity in May than to have too little solar in December.
by epistasis