The Challenge Of Solar In Northern Latitudes

Dave Boyer at Mudrock Energy, LLC published a very interesting chart. It illustrates one of the key challenges for integrating solar into the grid. When solar is installed at higher latitudes, the capacity factor variation from summer to winter increases dramatically. His full analysis is available at https://www.mudrockenergy.com/post/solar-capacity-factors.

This variation will show up in several ways. The high capacity factors in summer are great. During these periods, there will be lots of clean solar power available through the longer days. The price will probably be very low during the day. However, in the winter, the drop to 5% or 10% capacity factor means that very little energy will be available, and then only for a few hours a day. This can be expected to drive up evening and night electricity prices.

This is a huge problem. If heating is electrified, the highest demand will occur during the season with the lowest capacity factor and at night when solar is not available. Solving this problem will require solar overbuild, long distance transmission upgrades and energy storage... lots of energy storage. All of these will drive up the cost of electricity in the northern latitudes.

This is one of the reasons that collecting solar energy in space, without night or clouds, then beaming it 24/7 to where it is needed makes sense. It can solve the challenges with the ground renewable intermittency and drive down the cost of energy.