Texan Solar - Inconvenient Truth for Blackout BowenThis is wild....

Texan Solar - Inconvenient Truth for Blackout Bowen

This is wild. When solar was first added to the Texas grid, it was great. By 2020 it covered 42% of demand during net peak load.

But as more was added, it pushed the peak later into the evening when solar drops off. Now, even though solar production is 5x higher, it only covers 4% of the net peak. New capacity in winter basically contributes zero at peak times

All new solar capacity can do is eat into the profitability of dispatchable generation, which then has to charge more due to a smaller window to recover fixed costs. In other words, additional solar now makes electricity more expensive.

In fact, 50% of ERCOT’s electricity costs now occur in just 14% of the time.There’s a metric called ELCC that captures this. Basically how much a generator helps meet peak demand. Solar’s ELCC is dead and buried.

"But batteries!"

All batteries can do is help balance the chaos + make dispatchable power less profitable. Adding complexity to fix complexity is like farting to hide the smell of .

Due to the drop in solar radiation in winter, if solar and batteries where to cover summer demand then electricity costs in winter would be astronomical because the fixed overheads of the dispatchable resources would the need to be covered just in winter while maintaining the capacity to cover 100% of peak demand during a cloudy week when the batteries are flat.