alt Hacker NewsHere are some numbers: January 2025, the output of solar was ~1500 GWh, it peaked in June at 10500 GWh. So the lowest output was about 15% of the maximum, this year.
https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&...
https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&...
Looking at wind, the ratio between min and max per week is about 1:5 (~1200 vs ~6000 GWh). Just as there is always some solar power generation, there is never no wind, though looking at those charts there were 4 weeks in the late summer of 2023 when production was low consecutively, between 700 and 1000 GWh.
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> it peaked in June at 10500 GWh
And 8280 GWh the previous June for those wondering roughly how much of this was due to more solar panels being deployed.
How do you interpret these numbers? If your point is that we can simply overprovision photovoltaik arrays by a factor of 6.67, then that would make solar the most expensive power generation method by far.
And it only gets worse the more households transition to heatpumps, because the consumption in winter is so lopsided. For example, I heat my home with a heatpump, and I have 10 kWp of solar arrays on my roof. In the last week of July, we consumed 84 kWh and generated 230 kWh (273 %). In the last week of November, we consumed 341 khW and generated 40 kWh (11 %). This means we'd need roughly 10 times as much PV area to match demand (10 roofs?), and huge batteries because most of that consumption is in the evening, at night, and in the morning.
Of course, utility-scale and residential solar behave a bit differently, and it becomes more complicated if wind is factored in. But it shows that you can't just overprovision PV a little to fix the main problem of solar power: that it is most abundant in summer, and most in demand in winter.
And this also leaves out all the heating power still consumed directly from fossil fuels. The gap is much larger.
This doesn't have have to be by switching consumption; using less is possible: Passivhaus is from Germany, after all. However, you can't do that and keep all your historical protections on buildings and layers-upon-layers of red tape on renovations.