I agree 100% with your post. Great way to show the problem. There is another issue.
New York electric resource reliability standard plans on a loss of load expectation of one outage every ten years. Unsurprisingly, shows that the worst “dunkeflaute” gap for a ten-year period was shorter than the gap over a longer period. The philosophical safety problem that needs to be addressed is what timing horizon do you use for the worst-case planning scenario? Planning for only ten years means that during a one in fifteen years event the electric energy resources will not be enough to prevent a blackout. But how far out do you go. I believe that this is a tradeoff that inevitably ensures that there will be a blackout when a renewable energy resource lull inevitably exceeds the planning horizon because of their weather dependency.
10 years is way too short. It's of less duration than natural decadal/multidecadal variability which drives the likelihood of annual wind droughts and extended winter Dunkelflautes.
I agree. I think the analysis that I have in mind using meteorological reanalysis data is possible only back to 1950. Do you think that is long enough?
And isn't the electrical grid like 18% of total world energy demands? Even if you got it to 50% - 9% total world energy demands, there's still a 91% shortfall in "green" energy.
For those interested in this aspect of green energy, Chris Bond has published an analysis of the prospects for net-zero in the sunshine state itself, California:
It's long and detailed - and looks at long term energy storage.
In short, the seasonal shortfalls with renewables cannot realistically be met by long term storage. So future California will be unable to avoid outages.
It probably needs its assumptions and methodology checked by someone who knows much more about this than I do!
I agree with your comments - indeed,if we were to install 10,000,000,000 x 5MW wind turbines, during Dunkleflaute, you get 0GW (not 50GW) and at those times (there are many), you need back up
I agree 100% with your post. Great way to show the problem. There is another issue.
New York electric resource reliability standard plans on a loss of load expectation of one outage every ten years. Unsurprisingly, shows that the worst “dunkeflaute” gap for a ten-year period was shorter than the gap over a longer period. The philosophical safety problem that needs to be addressed is what timing horizon do you use for the worst-case planning scenario? Planning for only ten years means that during a one in fifteen years event the electric energy resources will not be enough to prevent a blackout. But how far out do you go. I believe that this is a tradeoff that inevitably ensures that there will be a blackout when a renewable energy resource lull inevitably exceeds the planning horizon because of their weather dependency.
Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York Blog
10 years is way too short. It's of less duration than natural decadal/multidecadal variability which drives the likelihood of annual wind droughts and extended winter Dunkelflautes.
I agree. I think the analysis that I have in mind using meteorological reanalysis data is possible only back to 1950. Do you think that is long enough?
Probably.
And isn't the electrical grid like 18% of total world energy demands? Even if you got it to 50% - 9% total world energy demands, there's still a 91% shortfall in "green" energy.
For those interested in this aspect of green energy, Chris Bond has published an analysis of the prospects for net-zero in the sunshine state itself, California:
https://chrisbond.substack.com/p/california-reality
It's long and detailed - and looks at long term energy storage.
In short, the seasonal shortfalls with renewables cannot realistically be met by long term storage. So future California will be unable to avoid outages.
It probably needs its assumptions and methodology checked by someone who knows much more about this than I do!
Jaime, you can see NGESO historic fuel mix breakdown, including that measly storage here
https://www.nationalgrideso.com/data-portal/historic-generation-mix/historic_gb_generation_mix
I agree with your comments - indeed,if we were to install 10,000,000,000 x 5MW wind turbines, during Dunkleflaute, you get 0GW (not 50GW) and at those times (there are many), you need back up