Hi Kragen, small world! At an individual scale, I think plan B is pretty much always a small tri-fuel generator. At a society scale, it's probably a natural gas turbine. If batteries continue to follow their own price curve down, storage may well be a viable answer to 95%+ dunkelflautes at some point in our lifetimes.
I'm curious about the land use analysis and the embodied energy. Given the capacity factor inherent in my climate, will solar panels ever pay off the energy used to make, ship, and install them? Similar question for batteries. And how much land do we need to cover to handle the P95 dark/calm weeks?
Anyway, interesting stuff. Solar continues to eat the world, slowly but surely. :)
batteries use an insignificant amount of land, but probably overprovisioning of solar production is cheaper than batteries until you get into those 95th percentiles you're talking about. so probably we're talking about something like 10× the land use for solar panels that would be needed to meet demand on average? it depends a lot on how much demand flexibility there is; will dunkelflaute electrical grid demand be 20% of average grid demand, 2%, or 0.2%? that's a question that depends on things like what new designs people come up with for aluminum smelters and haber-bosch fertilizer plants, which is impossible to anticipate ahead of time
I'm curious about the land use analysis and the embodied energy. Given the capacity factor inherent in my climate, will solar panels ever pay off the energy used to make, ship, and install them? Similar question for batteries. And how much land do we need to cover to handle the P95 dark/calm weeks?
Anyway, interesting stuff. Solar continues to eat the world, slowly but surely. :)