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Gibbon1 10 hours ago

I tried estimating how much power was curtailed from their big scary number(tm).

3 million megawatt hours per year.

Assuming 2200 hours of sun per years that's 1.4GW average. Total solar is 15-18GW maybe. So what 10% gets curtailed.

Maybe throw some more containerized batteries at it.

LA Times always feels like The Wall Street Journal of the west. Your go to source for reactionary negativism.

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Arnt 9 hours ago | parent [-]

10% goes to waste…

I've never worked anywhere that had significant servers and managed to load the production server CPUs anywhere near 90%. 9% perhaps.

Yes I think that's a fair comparison. Both are about choosing the appropriate capacity and the solution involves electronics without any moving parts.

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_aavaa_ 4 hours ago | parent [-]

The only downside with drawing these kinds of analogies is that you're still paying an operating cost for the unused portion of your production server.

The light falling on a solar panel is free.

Yeah there's theoretical lost revenue, but that's a theoretical loss versus a real loss from operating costs.

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Arnt 2 hours ago | parent [-]

If you want to be pedantic, hail falling on solar panels isn't free and happens sometimes. But adding up these kinds of cost requires a large dose of pedantry, because the costs are so small compared to the cost of operating devices that have moving parts.

(Pedantry is fun, of course. I love it.)

	▲	_aavaa_ 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		My comment wasn't so much about being pedantic, though insurance would cover the hail and you're paying for that regardless of output amount. I was more taking umbrage with referring to curtailed solar and wind as "waste". It isn't waste any more than the sunlight falling on a plot of land without a solar panel is waste; neither have a real marginal cost associated with them. Unlike say the coal plant that chooses to go into negative prices rather than turn down its output.