A giugno, il solare è diventato la più grande fonte di elettricità in Europa per la prima volta in assoluto, con una quota del 22,1%

Yes solar peaks mid day then reduces to zero at night. That won’t change.

the summer months are going to be soon pretty much solved at the European level with solar+ nighttime battery and hydro storage

**solar generated in June almost as much electricity(45.4 Twh) as all fossil fuel sources put together (48.5 Twh)**

of the fossil power production, roughly 2/3 was consumed during the night, so at most 16% of electricity demand in June was night-time fossil fuels

for comparison, battery storage already accounts for 6 % of daily power demand in California, and keeps getting cheaper

as you can see, however, winter months are going to be harder to solve, unless we overbuild solar by a factor of 2-3 times more than peak summer demand, and wind , while mostly a good source of power, has a higher day to day variability than solar

not to mention that solar is cheaper than wind and will keep getting cheaper

so summer months will permanently see cheaper electricity than winter months

**will we see some energy heavy industries moving towards seasonal production? factories, steel mills etc. running 3 shifts during summer , but only 1-2 shifts in January and February?**

**if electricity in Summer is 5 or even 10 times cheaper than in winter , why not?**

build up stocks of production during summer months , and use them up during winter( for steel, aluminium, that is easily doable)

power utilities would even encourage these kind of behaviour with cheaper contracts, since it would reduce their need for peak gas or hydrogen plants during winter

what do you think?

Is it possible to use excess solar production to produce hydrogen or any other long term storage for the winter months? Is it being worked on in any scale?

Look at that beautiful steady curve of Nuclear.

The real solution to our energy problems

Yeah but on average it’s not…

The grid operators in Germany started complaining last year that due to many households with solar roofs, too much electricity is generated into the grid and they can barely accept all of it (of course it’s an excuse so they don’t pay a lot of money to those consumers that produce sometimes half of what they consume), yet, we don’t get “almost free” electricity here.. and we constantly get warnings of “grid overloaded” and etc. why? Because it was never intended for making our electricity more affordable.
Even if solar would produce 100% of our power from the sun the entire summer – they will still try to gauge us with the pricing.

So you’re saying this would be the right time for me to get one of those fancy ( and expensive ) wall battery systems?

well that’s good i guess. to be able to run thos AC’s with solar power at least. although i suppose soon when everyone gets an AC they will heat up the cities so that you can just use the heat energy to boil water and run turbines