I believe the car market is very depressed in the summer months, especially August, so a good chunk of it is probably simply people buy more cars in September than in August.
Proportion would be more interesting.
The question is not about solar or not, it's about what amount makes sense in a given place at a given time.
Sunny places close to the equator can probably go 90%+ from solar + batteries. Somewhere like Europe will have a lower number, maybe more like 40/50%.
And there's still the big question of: what do we do when solar and wind and storage are not enough? Because the numbers above are averages, not constants.
Right now all the answers are unsatisfactory: do not match supply to demand, but there's only so much you can do before people can't afford to heat themselves, and it's not good for your industries. Use gas-powered plants, but we want a carbon free grid. Nuclear but it's very expensive. Massively overbuild renewables but it's also very expensive. Add transmissions to far away places where they have power: also very expensive, and an added dependency/geopolitical risk.
On average. That doesn't mean there aren't sunny weeks where you get a lot more, and dark weeks where you get less. For instance if you get snow, output is pretty much 0 unless you clean them.
I believe there were 7-10 days in January 2025 where both solar and wind were in the single % digit for instance.
Of those 7-10 days, how many were consecutive? A couple days of single-digit efficiency each winter would be trivial to manage with batteries. I'm sure we can figure out a solution for the snow issue, especially since panels are usually angled.
Don't get me wrong, I get where you're coming from! But especially in the last 2-3 years, it seems like people always evaluate solar under the worst 0.01% chance scenario, which other power sources never have to survive. For example, not even half the days in January 2025 had single-digit outputs, yet they're still called "close to 0".
What I'd love to know is e.g.: in 99% of years, what's the worst Dunkelflaute we can expect? How much battery storage/solar overbuilding would we need to cover that, how much would it cost, and how much will it cost in a few years (based on current development rates)? I'd argue it'd be okay to reduce power-hungry industry for at worst few days, in case a once-in-a-century year happens.
The issue is though that you are saying 0.01% chance scenario, but gas/nuclear doesn't all go down at once at the same time every year. It's a somewhat fair counter that you might have serious gas disruptions, but LNG does massively diversify potential supply (and in the UKs case we have and will have a fair amount of domestic production for the next while).
Also keep in mind the overbuilding a massive problem anyway _outside_ of those 1-2 weeks worst case scenarios. We already have highly negative prices occurring more and more, and IMO this is the definition of policy failure, because the negative prices only arise because subsidies _encourage_ plants to keep producing even though the value is quite literally negative of the output.
Finally I don't think it's once in a century, probably most years have a significant Dunkelflaute event. And not all industry can be shut down like that (eg aluminium production) without causing catastrophic damage, and even if they can it makes them an unreliable supplier.
> The issue is though that you are saying 0.01% chance scenario, but gas/nuclear doesn't all go down at once at the same time every year.
Over this summer, a huge number of nuclear plants in Europe went down all at the same time, because they either would have killed the nearby river ecosystem by overheating it, or because they didn't have enough water to operate safely. This issue is only going to get worse as climate change progresses, and unlike most Dunkelflauten, the heat & drought really affect most of the continent at once.
> Also keep in mind the overbuilding a massive problem anyway _outside_ of those 1-2 weeks worst case scenarios.
It's only a problem because power generation tech like nuclear is so expensive, and it would become even more expensive if they couldn't run as much as possible. If we had a fully renewable+battery-driven grid, the issue would disappear.
> Finally I don't think it's once in a century, probably most years have a significant Dunkelflaute event.
I think you might unknowingly be ideologically motivated, because I specified that we should build enough to cover every Dunkelflaute in 99% of years. The amount of battery storage in this scenario by definition suffices for 99% of years, which makes the point about unreliability moot.
Fwiw, I'm currently having an house built, and I was asked to choose the colour of the garage door.
I tried giving AI all the plans, descriptions, 2D artist renders, and pictures of the house under construction so that it could make a render with a bunch of different options to help me choose.
The textures were surprisingly good, but the overall plan was a total disaster, even if I tried to guide it. It's two semi detached houses, but there was just one really long house. There was either one too many floor or one missing. The windows were totally random. And the orientation/positioning of the buildings on the plot had nothing to do with the plan. It even hallucinated stairs to reach the property when the whole thing is flat.
All of this to say I don't think AI is there yet to build this kind of illustrations based on just a floor plan and some pictures.
You ought to give it a blender install and ask it to model the house for you & show you color options for the garage door, I bet it would be much closer. I had Astra w/ Codex model rigged miter saws, table saws and router tables for my carpentry simulator [0], it did a surprisingly decent job.
It's definitely a better approach. I was just checking what the models were capable of with a simple one off approach. And honestly, it mostly did what I required, which was the texture work. The rest didn't really matter in my case.
I'm sure with a bit more efforts/tokens, you can do something amazing, with a virtual visit and so on.
That would probably be better suited with a vision model of some sort or some other model specifically trained on the task at hand. It's not a problem with AI in general but rather using a general AI for a special use case.
I believe the argument was that for some people, switching stocks into cash actually do change the wealth, because they own such a large % they are meaningfully moving the market by selling (the "paper money" argument).
And the answer to that was "if you're so afraid that selling will tank the value of the stock, then we [the government] will happily take your taxes as stocks directly, and we take on the risk that selling it will reduce its value".
> And the answer to that was "if you're so afraid that selling will tank the value of the stock, then we [the government] will happily take your taxes as stocks directly, and we take on the risk that selling it will reduce its value".
Yes indeed. It's basically saying "don't bother starting everything because the government will gradually just own it all anyway".
That works for artifacts, but there's no easy solutions for all the security tools that relies on pulling up to date external databases. Databases that are out of your control and often down in my experience.
Yeah, it's tricky because basically all solar arrays (rooftop and utility) all come online at more-or-less the same time so there's a huge influx of supply which drives the price down.
You can get a sense of it if you look at the daily breakdown:
The price goes negative around 2pm most days, in which case, as a solar only operator you're losing money to generate power, so quite often there's curtailment.
And then at 6pm, the sun is down so solar-only operators can't capitalise on the opportunity.
So unfortunately it's just a very limited opportunity to make a profit on your investment each day. More demand during the peak generation time would help!
See the 5y graph here: https://tradingeconomics.com/european-union/car-registration...
There's always a massive drop in August for some reasons.
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