The solar farms produce enough excess during the day to offset the non-solar usage at night.
That is pure garbage. The amount of power that needs to be generated at night remains constant and solar power has little impact on that. Power usage at night si actually frustrating for everybody involved in energy generation because often the light loads end up being handled in very inefficient ways.
That means somewhere less coal or uranium is getting burned to the same degree or better than if the solar plant could run during the night.
First; off Uranium is not burned, the heat for the steam generators is generated via nuclear processes.
Second; the amount of solar energy generated in this country is a tiny fraction of what is needed to power the country. That tiny contribution to the electrical grid comes with a massive waste of land space, often in areas with sensitive ecosystems.
Since all the energy gets mixed into the grid anyway, it doesn't make any sense to talk about where the energy actually goes and comes from.
Sure it does because stupid things like people thinking nuclear energy is dangerous can be addressed. We can address the massive waste of land space that the huge solar farms cause and the negative impacts such farms have on the planet.
So long as it's made cleanly, the right customer pays for it, and some dirty energy is scaled back to compensate.
Scaling back on coal isn't a bad idea. What is a bad idea is scaling back on coal so rapidly that you literally destroy communities built up around the coal mines. If the government is going to press such a policy they really need to address the harm they cause to people involved in the industry. In this regard the past administration failed massively.
I can't speak for the US energy grid but other countries are developing batteries in the 200MW range to address the future issue of supply peaks failing to meet demand peaks.
There are all sorts of utility scale battery projects going on. I believe GE is not utility scale batteries but the problem here is the efficiency and safety of such systems. Lithium batteries in cell phones can fail spectacularly but imagine a battery failure where you store a million times more energy. I honestly don't see batteries a as a long timer solution.
The only real solution to energy independence is with the nuclear technologies. That can mean safer fission reactors but the real long term solution is fusion reactors which government should be heavily involved in pushing the various designs forward. Nuclear is the only way to clean electricity while controlling land use and the negative side effects of solar electric. Anybody that takes a serious look at population growth, power demands and the various solutions vs risks would be demanding a massive investment in new nuclear solutions.
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Consider that the Tesla Gigafactory will be running 24/7, It's not like Robots go to sleep at night
As mw360 mentioned, the Solar Farms can offset the non-solar usage at night with the excess generated throughout the day.
That's where Tesla's Microgrid batteries (Powerpacks), come in.
Come on guys there is no solar excess. The amount of solar power generated during the day is a tiny fraction of what is used energy wise in this country on a daily basis. Frankly there never will be as people wise up to the horrible use of limited land mass from these systems.
By the way I'm not against solar electric completely. What I'm against is wasting land mass for nothing more than these massive solar electric plants.
One thing that would go a long way to solving problems are building regulations that demand solar electric integration in all new buildings. For homes simply demand 1000 watts of solar power per 1000 sq feet of home. That isn't exactly a lot of solar power either but if every new home built required tax much integrated power it would go a long ways to reducing the use of coal. The thing is 1000 watts of solar power per 1000sq feet, isn't a huge cost burden on a new house.
Part of the problem in this country at least is the grasping at a massive project as a solution to a particular problem. Sometimes that is justifiable but there is often smaller solutions, that spread around, are less disruptive and frankly less hideous. So in my mind Apple is getting it half right most of the time. They sometimes do building integration but just as often build these rather stupid solar farms that are pretty disruptive to the environment.
