Comments by "Bob thebomb" (@bobthebomb1596) on "'Intermittent, not dispatchable': Renewable energy's ‘often not there when you want it’" video.

@tassied12 No it's not Australia. Solar is reliable in that you can guarantee to lose it entirely for ten hours a day. Solar is poor over here but we have some of the best conditions anywhere for wind power and wind does not stop at night. When renewables are working they are good, when they are not working its time to light the fossil fuel stations.
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@tassied12 I have seen similar figures in the UK;14GW generated by wind and 7GW by solar and 62% of demand. The trouble is that for three and a half days last week total wind and solar was under 5GW, at their worst under 1GW. Average generation over the past year was 10.5GW (34.3% of average demand) The simple fact is, renewables only work if you have both excess generating capacity and copious storage. For the UK that would be 2,500 GWh to cover 3.5 days.
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@tassied12 We have just done the same, 196MWh of storage. To meet three and a half days of UK power would require over 12,500 of them. All of this is at a time when most cars, buses, lorries and some trains run on fossil fuel. When the majority of houses are heated by gas. People just done realise the scale of nett zero.
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@tassied12 67% when? Always? Hydro?
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@tassied12 How much installed capacity?
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If they announced positive energy balance tomorrow it would be ten years just to design and license the first commercial reactor, let alone construct one.
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@tassied12 Britain is not "returning to coal." The UK only has three coal fired plants left and there are no plans to build more. The old ones are in various states of demolition. As I type (15:42) our power grid is in a shocking state. The 25GW+ of installed renewables are generating just 1.4GW and we are having to import almost five times that power from Europe to meet demand. In contrast Gas is delivering 22.6GW, Coal 1.3GW, Nuclear 5.7GW and Biomass 1.4GW; all must be running at full capacity.
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Under current conditions the best bet might be a high temperature gas reactor co-sited with hydrogen/ammonia production. Run it at high capacity all the time and either supply electricity or manufacture hydrogen or ammonia feedstock as demand dictates?
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