[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Good stuff in this one....

Wonder what the facts are in the USA?

[GeronL]

bump!

[DuncanWaring]

“California” is here:

http://www.caiso.com/Pages/TodaysOutlook.aspx#SupplyandDemand

21 GW minimum overnight.

[Paladin2]

My minimum instantaneous house usage is ~26 watts. Overnight average power can be as low as 150 watts (it's the refrigerator that's the culprit).

Peak usage can easily go over 7500 watts.

That's a dynamic range of 300. A non-trivial engineering task to be able to go off grid.

[Mister Da]

“Wonder what the facts are in the USA?”

I’m gonna guess, exactly the same.

The sun is no brighter in the USA, nor the wind any stronger. The US has no superior way to efficiently store electricity for nightly use. Our daily usage pattern mimics the Australian one.

[Marine_Uncle]

Good analysis of how solar and wind simply cannot compete with nuclear or fossil fuel power generation.

[SunkenCiv]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quad_(unit)

A quad is a unit of energy equal to 1015 (a short-scale quadrillion) BTU,[1] or 1.055 ¥ 1018 joules (1.055 exajoules or EJ) in SI units.

[/snip]

One example from wiki-wacky is that 8,007,000,000 gal of gas equals one quad, that’s over 190 million barrels. Most of our electricity still comes from coal; next largest is (I suspect) the fast-growing use of natural gas; hydroelectric sources account for a smaller percentage than it did in 1970, although I think the overall output has risen.

We use a *lot* of electricity, it’s measured in quads (), sez here (different page) in 2010 the US sucked down 97.8 quads.