…and the rest of the time it's good old coal and gaz.
Each nights, when it's cloudy, when it's raining… during all those time periods (so way more than 50%) there's no sun. You can install GW of solar panels, they'll produce during those time close to 0MW of electricity.
Math are already done, "backing-up" things with batteries works to power up for a few hours a neighbor or hospitals. This doesn't work to provide electricity each nights and during cold-not-sunny-winter weeks or hot-AC-everywhere-summer-nights.
Even if you store things in water dam, that is today the easiest, quickest and most cost efficient way of storing electricity. In France where all the dam are already build we basically have only a few days of "electricity storage". Battery is around 2% of the total, so less than a few hours.
If you install "dirty" backup, such as gaz or coal, you're basically erasing all the benefit of installing win turbines or solar panels regarding CO² emission.
If you choose to install nuclear power plants as backup, regarding the building cost and the fact that such plan is having a big inertia (days) regarding the nuclear fission and that the cost stays roughly the same whatever change you're making. You better not use that as backup solution but better than a close to 0 CO² emission source (in France wind turbine is ~60g of CO² per MW, it's 6g of C0² for nuclear plants).
Each nights, when it's cloudy, when it's raining… during all those time periods (so way more than 50%) there's no sun. You can install GW of solar panels, they'll produce during those time close to 0MW of electricity.
Math are already done, "backing-up" things with batteries works to power up for a few hours a neighbor or hospitals. This doesn't work to provide electricity each nights and during cold-not-sunny-winter weeks or hot-AC-everywhere-summer-nights.
Even if you store things in water dam, that is today the easiest, quickest and most cost efficient way of storing electricity. In France where all the dam are already build we basically have only a few days of "electricity storage". Battery is around 2% of the total, so less than a few hours.
If you install "dirty" backup, such as gaz or coal, you're basically erasing all the benefit of installing win turbines or solar panels regarding CO² emission.
If you choose to install nuclear power plants as backup, regarding the building cost and the fact that such plan is having a big inertia (days) regarding the nuclear fission and that the cost stays roughly the same whatever change you're making. You better not use that as backup solution but better than a close to 0 CO² emission source (in France wind turbine is ~60g of CO² per MW, it's 6g of C0² for nuclear plants).