@MattMastodon @Sodis We’re going in circles. Volatile sources can only supply 40% of current demand for £50/MWh. The question is what fills the rest.
If storage, then the price goes up immediately by at least two conversion losses from/to storage, in addition to the cost of storage itself. Which doesn’t exist at the needed scalability.
Pointing to single projects is not meaningful, as we need to build a fleet anyway, which has its own dynamics.
I’ll try to explain the 40%, sorry for the parts that you already know.
Electric energy is always produced at the same time (and »place« roughly) as it is consumed. (You can’t pump electricity into some reservoir to be consumed later, you always need a different energy form for storage.)
The problem with volatile sources is that they mostly (more than half) produce energy at the wrong time and/or the wrong place, and at other times produce nothing.
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⇒ Aside: the »place« problem is that you can’t build solar panels and wind turbines just anywhere, and they need a lot of space. E. g. Germany has now the problem that the wind blows much better in the north, but the industry is more in the south. So, you need a lot more/stronger transmission lines. Same for offshore wind: more wind at sea, but you need a lot of cables.
The more wind and solar you already have, the more the good places are already taken.
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OK so I have googled the men capacity factor and of course #nuclear has nearly 100% and #renewables only 40%.
But this just means it produces on average 40% of it’s capacity. You’d need a sunny windy day to get 100%
What I’ve read about is a #SWB (Solar wind and battery) system with massive overcapacity
So biomass, hydro and battery can take up the slack when needed. Or gas - which has a very low mean capacity factor <10% but is usually used as a last resort
