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points by crote 3 days ago | 0 comments

Solar panels still work just fine when it is cloudy, just with a lower output. And usually when it is cloudy it also tends to be a bit windy, so solar and wind nicely complement each other.

Heavy clouds and zero wind, for weeks? That's a once-a-century freak event. Just build gas peaker plants if you are worried about it. You could even add carbon capture, but constructing it might emit more than it will ever capture...

[–] dgudkov 3 days ago

> Solar panels still work just fine when it is cloudy, just with a lower output.

I assume you never tried measuring the output of a solar panel when it's cloudy. It's 10-15% of a sunny day. Closer to not working than working.

[–] bruce511 3 days ago

Depends on the cloud. Where I live I routinely get 50% generation on a "cloudy" day.

On a rainy day that drops closer to 20%.

As an aside - cloudy days avoid a problem I have with shade. In winter, at 3:30pm, the sun goes behind a tree and my production plummets to near zero. If there's cloud cover the sunlight is far more dispersed and there's no "shade".

[–] andsoitis 3 days ago

> On a rainy day that drops closer to 20%

And you’re still able to power your entire home? What if the rain lasts for a few days, which is pretty common in many places.

[–] bruce511 3 days ago

No, 20% is not sufficient to power the home. I'm still attached to the grid and use grid power even solar is too low.

[–] stephen_g 3 days ago

Worst I've had over a day in the last few months on my home solar is about 25% of my maximum daily generation. It was one day in a very rainy week here in Brisbane Australia.

I did have one rainy day back in the middle of Winter that was 16% but that will end up being literally the worst day of the year.

[–] tialaramex 2 days ago

To be fair Australia is very sunny. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_irradiance

It also has relatively wealthy people, living in lots of individual housing units. If you wanted to design a country that's perfect for rooftop solar your imagination might come up with Australia.

That said, Australia ought to be able to run almost everything off solar given how sunny it is, and instead solar is a distant second behind coal for electricity production. So there's plenty of work left to do.

[–] zdragnar 3 days ago

That's every single winter where I live in the US. We don't have a word for it like the Germans do, though, we just call it January.

[–] PaulDavisThe1st 3 days ago

The good news is: you're on a national (or semi-national) grid, and conditions like that are more unusual than they are common across the USA.

[–] kulahan 3 days ago

You want us to transport energy 1500 miles? Cold, dark winters cover enormous swathes of the US - inconveniently, often at similar times. So what - we're turning Florida into a solar park so the rest of the nation can use that while they're dark?

Our energy grid can't currently handle the ability to charge electric haulers locally at any scale let alone to move an entire city's worth of energy, so the solution is not to 85x the national electric grid all at once.

[–] ZeroGravitas 3 days ago

I used to think the people who took this "America is too incompetent to make the green transition" stance were just downplaying the tech out of some combination of ignorance and weird partisan logic.

But to give them due credit, they believed in this vision and put in the hard work to make sure it became true.

[–] eldaisfish 2 days ago

the US regularly wastes money on its military and fights wars around the world, causing misery for millions.

If the US decided to divert half of the Pentagon's annual budget to electricity, the US could absolutely build the infrastructure to transport electricity thousands of kilometres.

[–] acdha 2 days ago

Serious citation needed that there are week-long stretches of continuous wind-free heavy cloud covering thousand mile stretches of the United States.

Also, it’s weird to talk about Florida when, say, Arizona and Utah, etc. are right there. Even Wyoming despite being further north has over half of the month sunny in the winter. One thing to remember is that we could power the entire country using solar with a fraction of the land currently used to produce corn for ethanol so we don’t even need to substantially change land use, just stop subsidizing inefficient fuel generation.

[–] eldaisfish 2 days ago

Here's your serious citation - the polar vortex.

These usually drop ambient temperatures across Canada and the northern US to below -20 C, and produce generally high winds. This combination of extreme cold, cloud cover, and high winds last for multiple days, often longer than a week.

The wind plus cold means that many wind turbines cannot operate and the cloud cover and shorter days mean that solar is barely generating any energy.

[–] defrost 3 days ago

> You want us to transport energy 1500 miles?

That's literally CCP state controlled communism !! More specifically, that's what the Gansu–Zhejiang UHVDC project has as an overhead transmission line length (2,370 km in international units).

* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014206152...

* https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20241113-will-chinas-ultr...

[–] PaulDavisThe1st 2 days ago

The very decidely non-communist SunZia wind project in SE New Mexico (not too from where I live, and the largest wind generation system in the world at this point) came with a 1600km new grid line connecting it to California (though it is a part of the overall western grid too, and electricity is fungible).

[–] defrost 2 days ago

Ahhh, I jested - I accept some in the US have no problem getting it together on collective civil infrastructure projects that benefit many.

The GP might be in the group that don't much like that kind of thing.

[–] hunter-gatherer 3 days ago

Carbon capture makes little sense until fossil fuels have been replaced. I guess there are some Bio char technologies that might change the equation a bit, but watt for watt, you need to replace your carbon emissions first (generally speaking)