This is an opinion editorial by Mickey Koss, a West Point graduate with a degree in economics. He spent four years in the infantry before transitioning to the Finance Corps.
Imagine if you will, a seller of items that only worked under certain weather conditions. A car that only drives when it’s sunny. A heater that only works when it’s windy. Would you ever buy them? I don’t think you would. Because it’s illogical. Why would you want anything that worked on probability-based weather conditions?
Sure they’re predictable to an extent, but have you ever noticed how much the forecast can change from hour to hour? There’s an entire mathematical concept that was discovered when a meteorologist rounded a number in his weather prediction model. The outcome; a completely different prediction. Chaos theory was born.
Probability-Based Electricity: A New Framework For Wind And Solar
I think it’s time to rebrand these intermittent electrical generation techniques. I’d like to introduce a new name which I think better captures their shortcomings: probability-based electricity.
Intermittent already implies that they are guaranteed not to work at least some of the time.
The intermittent nature of these sources necessitates the overbuilding of probability-based capacity. This is because the systems are based on weather conditions, the predictions of which are based on models — probabilistic models.
With wind generation specifically, there is a small window of wind speed where the turbines actually generate electricity. If the wind is too slow, the turbines can spin but will not actually generate electricity. If the wind is too fast, a brake is triggered so the turbines are not damaged. It’s like the Goldilocks of electricity production.
Probabilistic weather breeds probabilistic electricity generation. Wind and solar are fundamentally probabilistic systems.
I can’t imagine people would buy multiple cars, refrigerators or basically anything simply to mitigate…
