Critics of large-scale solar and wind projects rightly point to their inherent intermittency. Almost always, though, they focus on the huge gap between the theoretical ‘installed capacity’ (i.e., if they were to operate at 100 per cent efficiency) and real-world output. As they correctly argue, there are frequent ‘wind droughts’ when wind farms generate almost no power and at least half the day (i.e., night time) when solar doesn’t work at all, not to mention frequent cloudy spells that cut generation dramatically.
But the frequent dearth of solar and wind power are only half the story. Just as damaging to grid stability is when solar and wind produce too much power. This may seem paradoxical, but a grid is, in its most basic form, like any other electrical circuit: overload it and chaos ensues.
When the entire state of South Australia was blacked out in 2016, the cause was not, as the MSM would have you believe, collapsing transmission towers: that happened immediately after the event that blacked out the state. On that windy day, the state’s major wind farms were forced into an emergency shutdown. In a fraction of a second, the fault cascaded through the system, ultimately overloading the interconnecter at the Victorian border, SA’s only source of power from outside the state.
Similar, a massive blackout in Spain and Portugal last April was caused by a sudden surge of solar power on a sunny day, which overloaded the system.
Greece is fast learning similar lessons.
Greece currently has 16 gigawatts of renewable energy installed, with solar power representing nearly 10 gigawatts, including 2.5 gigawatts that came on line last year […]
55 per cent of annual consumption was covered by renewables last year, with solar accounting for around 23 per cent, according to SPEF, an association which unites local solar power producers.
In 2023, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis predicted that Greece would “soon generate 80 percent of its electricity needs through renewables.”
And that’s the problem.
The Greek state approved too many photovoltaic projects over the last five years and the market is saturated, leading to a “severe production surplus” on sunny days, the 56-year-old chemical engineer and energy consultant said.
Greece’s national grid operator in May repeatedly ordered thousands of medium-sized operators to shut down during the sunniest hours of the day to avoid overburdening the network and triggering a blackout.
The proposed solution – so-called ‘big batteries’ – is little better than a band-aid. Even the most massive installations can only store a fraction of the power needed to keep a grid running smoothly for any length of time and they will eat up even more of the precious agricultural land that hasn’t been buried yet under solar panels.
Once a centre of agricultural production, the area around Kastron Viotias, some 110 kilometres (70 miles) northwest of Athens, has seen solar parks mushroom over the past 15 years, part of a major renewable energy push in the country.
It’s a financial windfall for some farmers, who can reap an income without having to do anything but mow the weeds. But the downsides are plenty. Not only is the formerly prize farmland not growing food any more, it’s also sending local temperatures soaring.
Mimis Tsakanikas, a 51-year-old farmer in Kastron […] notes that the environmental balance has tipped in his area, with the spread of solar installations now causing concerns about the local microclimate.
Tsakanikas says the area has already experienced temperature rises of up to 4.0 degrees Celsius (7.2 Fahrenheit), which he blames on the abundance of heat-absorbing solar panel parks in the area.
So much for saving themselves from ‘runaway warming’.
