will need a bit more than four hours of storage though

Horses for courses, right? They build these entire peaker power plants to sit idle most of the time, just to handle the couple dozen or hundred hours of maximum load in the year.

4 hours at a time hopefully buys you your way through such a peak, even if it doesn’t get you through weeks at a time… and presumably you can top it up from base load after demand peaks for the day, right?

In the equatorial and desert regions they’re talking about, I think both seasonal supply changes and demand profile might be more consistent than, say, dreary cold parts of Europe..

	▲	PaulHoule 15 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		That's a big part of what drives me crazy about the papers I've seen on this work. People like to quote some levelized price of energy and say "this costs less than an AP1000" and you never see modeling of "here's the price in California, here's the price in New York"

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Garlef an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Sure.

But no one is claiming that there will only be 4h-storage

	▲	PaulHoule 16 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I don't see a lot of realistic talk about what the actual storage requirements are. You have to be concerned about: (1) ordinary diurnal variation (overnight, lets say 12 hours) (2) extremely unfavorable weather (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute) (3) annual variation (you might get 3x the sunlight in summer than winter? do you build 180 days of storage or do you overbuild solar systems 3x and get Casey Handmer to dream up something useful to do with that excess energy that doesn't have a stupendous capital cost?) The "have a natural gas backup plan" is worse than people think for a lot of reasons, in terms of the laws of political science and economics you're going to find that that tail winds up wagging the dog, the whole market will get designed around the needs of those turbine owners, it's going to cost the same if they are running turbines for 5 minutes a year or 20 days a year, and ultimately you're never going to get rid of it. If you really plan to run the system 5 minutes a year what are the odds it will really work when you need it? You have to not just support the turbines you hardly ever use, pipelines you hardly ever use, drilling and storage operations for gas, etc.