
Record Set as India Produces 100 Billionth Unit of Renewable Energy in a Year - dsr12
https://thewire.in/energy/record-set-as-india-produces-100-billionth-unit-of-renewable-energy-in-a-year
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CalRobert
Could've reported this as 2.09431e+27 if they used electron-volts...

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cornholio
I find a renewable energy production of barely 3.4 Gthm (Giga therms)
completely insufficient.

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tzahola
* Assuming the "Unit of Renewable Energy" is watt-hours. In SI units (Joules) they have long passed this "milestone".

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lovelearning
I think the author of the article has got either his numbers or the metric
units quite wrong.

100,000 GWh = 100,000,000,000,000 (giga => x 10^9) which means it's actually
the 100 _trillionth_ unit.

And he repeats the mistake when saying "...and one hundred thousand million
units of electricity has eleven zeros" \- indeed it does but then 100000
million units is not 100000 G units.

EDIT: Actually I'm the one who got it wrong. Apparently, electrical "unit"
here is kWh not Wh, TIL.

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baking
Well, kWh are the traditional unit for electrical power. (And yes, I know it
is actually a unit of energy.)

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ggm
Why would the absolute amount of wind energy in India decline so steeply? I
can understand a rapid decline in relative share of renewables but it looked
like in absolute terms it fell off a cliff. That surely has to mean wind
systems got decommissioned.

The decline in dam efficiency is not a new thing. Is it possible to remediate?

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eigenvector
Wind generation is increasing year-over-year, you're just seeing a seasonal
difference because the chart cuts off at February. Wind resource availability
has a significant seasonal variation. Try comparing it to the same month a
year earlier.

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ggm
Thanks. I misread axes scaling and assumed multi year. Must look harder at
charts.

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littlestymaar
That's always sad to see people focused on _Energy_ when talking about
electricty : the grid needs _Power_ not _Energy_. And since you can't
realistically store electricity, these two are really different beasts.
Renewable is OK at producing _Energy_ , which we don't really care about after
a certain point, but it's terrible at producing a _reliable_ amount of _Power_
which is what we need.

More on that here :
[https://bourrasque.info/articles/20180116-moulins-%C3%A0-ven...](https://bourrasque.info/articles/20180116-moulins-%C3%A0-vent)
(in French though)

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ukulele
This is essentially incorrect. Renewables have predictable generation when
deployed on a large scale, and gas peaker plants can respond to changes as
needed. With the simplistic model of the article (nuclear + wind), it is easy
to reach the wrong conclusion.

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layoric
Really? In Australia we still see large wind and solar ramp events that are
hard to forecast and predict even with some of the most modern weather
forecasting approaches, these are solvable problems but I think calling
renewables predictable is a bit hand-wavy IMO.

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ukulele
It's not about forecasting the weather: good gas peakers can respond in under
10 minutes. I meant predictable in the sense of day/night/season.

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layoric
Gas is a good backup due to it’s response rate yes but regarding renewable
power generation, they are all about weather.

[http://www.hellogrid.com.au/energy-
exchange/1117/](http://www.hellogrid.com.au/energy-exchange/1117/)

As solar utility scale sites become more common (and they are), a cloud growth
can wipe 100s of MW off the grid very quickly and the problem is it is very
hard to tell how much will get wiped off and when (measured in minutes).

Gas will be in the mix for longer than other fossil fuels due to its reaction
time but as storage becomes cheaper and gas more expensive, it will be used
less and less IMO.

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littlestymaar
Storage isn't physically doable in practice though, and it's not just a matter
of cost at our current consumption level. We just don't have the natural
ressources to build enough storage.

To illustrate, storage is already really cheap in practice thanks to Pumped-
storage, we just have really sort supply of locations for such plants.

