By Paul Homewood
As I reported yesterday, India is pushing ahead with building an extra 94 GW of new coal power capacity, equivalent to half its current capacity.
So why can’t they simply build more solar farms instead? After all, as their new National Electricity Plan declares, India is ideally positioned to benefit from the potential energy:
However, as the NEP also points out:
Generation from renewable energy sources especially solar and wind is variable in nature and therefore, requires huge balancing capacity in the system.
And the Plan goes into plenty of detail to show just how variable both solar and wind power are.
Unlike in the UK, where demand is lowest at night, in India it is lowest in the middle of the day, and peaks during evening hours.
This is obviously not ideal, given that solar output peaks during the middle of the day, and has disappeared by early evening:
To make matters worse, output varies from month to month as well. It tend to be maximised during the summer, and drops to a minimum in October and November:
As we know here, wind power can also be extremely intermittent. It peaks at around 50% utilisation during monsoon months, but is little more than irrelevant during the rest of the year:
Fig 6.16 shows the peak output each day for solar and wind combined, and gives an idea of just how variable output can be during the year. Bear in mind that projected peak demand for 2021-22 is 225 GW, and that renewable capacity is expected to be even higher by 2026-27, and you will get some idea of just how hard it will be to integrate all of this variable output into India’s grid.
Unless they can persuade the sun to shine for 24 hours a day, India will still have to rely heavily on reliable, dispatchable power, whether from coal, nuclear or other sources.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
November 18, 2018 at 08:36AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 