The problem with batteries, or that "accumulated solar charging technology" is that it may work over night, but it would be useless in the weather we have this week. If solar can only work at 20% of it's nameplate capacity in January, you need...rough math, 3333 x Brooks Solar plants, in that brief instant where it provided 3MW of power, to actually provide that for half the day, and store the other half, so you really need 6666(somehow charging 12 hours a day, instead of an hour the currently grab). Except there were days where it produced almost nothing, so you would never even charge the batteries (or store the heat, since, well, there is negligible solar heat coming in at -30). I don't like to use thew word "impossible" but you can see this as a massive challenge.
Now, you may say that this week is an outlier, but you MUST have capacity for the worst case, not the best case, unless you are OK with lots of people dying. People say the other renewables will balance out on days when there is no sun, but we see wind at 1% of it's nameplate, and that's distributed over the province, so it's not a case of wind in one spot, none in another.
I've said it before but it is a very tough problem to solve. Gas, coal, nuclear...all great at it, but with their obvious drawbacks. We need to be really careful not to get ourselves into a renewables trap where we depend on them for something they can't provide. If this means we still deploy them for when they are useful, we must remain mindful that we still need baseload, and this will all result in increased costs, because you are building renewable generation as an added bonus, not as a reliable supply.
|