The Unbearable Lightness of Renewables – In Time
2 hours ago
By: Leen Weijers, VP Engineering, Liberty Energy
Wind and solar don’t work most of the time. You may think intermittency is acceptable because the sun shines for free and the wind blows for free. Capturing these diluted energy sources, however, is anything but free. If you require electricity to be available at the flip of a switch from renewables, their temporal lightness requires massive overbuilding, making wind and solar the most expensive sources of primary energy.
Solar and wind’s capacity factor, the actual energy output vs the maximum energy output over time, is only 14% for worldwide solar and only 26% for worldwide wind. If this strikes you as low, that is true, as this number is weighted toward installations by Europeans, for example Germans, who are ahead in installations in some areas most unsuitable for solar. But there are other reasons solar and wind work even less than you think.
The map below shows that the sun shines a lot more in the United States than in Germany, as it lies further to the south. In both places, sunshine duration is significantly higher than hours of electricity generation at maximum capacity, because the sun’s angle is seldom perfectly perpendicularly to a solar panel. While the German sun shines about 1,600 hours a year, generation at capacity is only 940 hours. Texas has 3,000 hours of sunshine a year, but generation at max capacity is only 1,600 hours a year.
Texas solar therefore works about as hard as a hardworking Frenchman, about 31 hours a week. German solar clocks an average of 18 hours a week, takes lots of vacation days, sick days and strikes occasionally. Both workers are highly unreliable, only show up when they want and count on other colleagues to pick up their slack at any given time. Would you hire them?
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/04/18/the-unbearable-lightness-of-renewables-in-time/
