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Texas power prices soared 20,000% Wednesday evening amid another brutal heat wave.
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Spot electricity prices topped $5,000 per megawatt-hour, up more than 200 times from Wednesday morning.
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The state’s grid operator issued its second-highest energy emergency, then later said conditions returned to normal.
If only there was some kind of energy source that worked best during intense sunlight.
Solar is only half the battle though. There can often be a severe electricity shortage in the evening when solar power shuts off but temperates are still high. This issue is greatest in the late summer and fall because it’s still very hot but the sun sets earlier.
There are solutions to this issue but they are fairly early in development and sometimes expensive. California is struggling with this issue currently. We’ve installed a huge amount of battery power over the last few years which has prevented several catastrophes so far but heat continues to get more severe, increasing energy needs as we are trying to shut down the state’s remaining gas peaker plants.
recently learned that if we went with nuclear decades ago this whole problem wouldn’t even exist. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/nuclear-power-isnt-perfect-is-it-good-enough/
That’s true of household panels (which are great for offsetting your daytime usage, which is usually your highest usage), but that is generally not true of large solar installations that heat up a huge mass of salt until it’s molten and then produce power from that source 24/7. Example: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/16012018/csp-concentrated-solar-molten-salt-storage-24-hour-renewable-energy-crescent-dunes-nevada/
TL/DR: large solar installations produce power 24/7 (yes, even when it’s dark)
Solar thermal isn’t really what we mean when we say solar power. The vast majority, even at utility scale, is PV panels just like the ones on your roof. Historically, solar thermal was too expensive and PV panels are still far cheaper.
That said, for areas like CA that may soon approach maximum solar penetration it may deserve a second look because of its more consistent energy output. It will mainly be competing with batteries, pumped hydro, and new generations of geothermal technology. All of these are new and fairly unproven at scale so we’ll have to learn as we go which is the best option for the later stages of decarbonizing the electrical grid.