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Comment by ipodopt | Hacker News Reader

Not after accounting for load balancing. Depending on the situation. Weather, load profiles, etc. Hence cheap energy storage being a big deal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_renewable_energy#Comp...

I remember my department had a few very large grants for solar and wind integration studies. There is always some x profitable level to integrate into some portion of the grid. Before you actually start to lose money. Used to be around 30% in most cases a decade ago. Imagine it is bit asymptotic without improvements to the cost of energy storage. I would guess 40% in most cases now.

Found this: https://www.iea.org/articles/will-system-integration-of-rene...

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Yes, I argue even when accounting for grid integration. It's a slam dunk anywhere where it's paired with natural gas due to fast throttling on open cycle and combined cycle turbines, and a little less so where coal is used. Nigeria, for example, is primarily natural gas for fossil electrical generation (~16% of their electrical generation capacity), so any kwh's you're generating with renewables is natural gas burned only when renewables can't meet load demand.

Check out South Australia on OpenNEM [1]. Paired with natural gas and transmission, they're at an exceptionally high amount of renewables penetration [2] and have a very low cost of power in Australia [3]. They're also using a large, recently expanded, Tesla utility scale battery for ancillary/frequency response services [4] (previously profitably performed by natural gas generators), which is causing financial pain for those mentioned gas operators (who are having trouble profiting now on either the power provided or frequency response services).

[1] https://opennem.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=7d&interval=30m

[2] https://www.afr.com/policy/energy-and-climate/coal-generatio...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/dec/24/south...

[4] https://hornsdalepowerreserve.com.au/

There are some regions for which storage requirements are relatively small, and would be perfect for 100% solar rollout targets.

Phoenix and Las Vegas come to mind - places where incident solar flux and electricity demand (due to heavy air conditioner use) almost perfectly coincide (peaks are separated by only ~50 minutes)

Nigeria also fits that description. It's right on the equator, meaning there's very little seasonal variation in solar. This is in contrast to all of Europe, especially northern Europe like the UK and Germany.

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