Yes a storm could damage the coal plant with some small probability. But now you have replaced the coal plant with batteries + solar. Solar will be disabled by every large storm due to cloud cover. The grid will certainly be less reliable.
From solar panels that we track at my organization the solar generation decreased by ~90% at 90% cloud cover. Cloud cover isn't the most important metric, it's irradiance, but still a good indicator and so yes, in a storm the power generation will drop by atleast 90% probably
> in a storm the power generation will drop by atleast 90% probably
This is incorrect for several reasons first we care about Wind + Solar + Hydro not Solar alone.
8X % reduction in solar over 15 minutes sure, but track full days output and it’s not 90% across the full day. Similarly you rarely see 100% of theoretical output over a full day, so it’s really the delta between expected output and minimum output that matters.
Also, you don’t build exactly as much generation as you would need assuming 100% output every single day. That’s just as true for Nuclear/coal etc as it is Solar / wind. Redundancy has a cost, but it can effectively guarantee a surplus.
Modern turbines can adjust the angle of their blades to extract less energy from the wind. There’s always tradeoffs so people still chose maximum wind speeds based on the area. But, we’re talking being near the center of a hurricane not just storms at that point.
“The beautifully bright and still weather may have been a welcome reason to hold off reaching for our winter coats, but the lack of wind can be a serious issue when we consider where our electricity might be coming from.”
Seems like a good case for using wind or wave power which would presumably provide max power during a storm when solar provides less power. Of course, I suppose a bad storm could also damage these forms of energy generation as well.
More likely that it would affect electricity cables and knock out power in a lot of areas. But that would be true regardless of the power source.
Batteries, like coal plants should be pretty resilient. Wind turbines should be mostly fine as well. The Chinese actually have lots of off shore wind and seasonal typhoons. You can expect some percentage of turbines to need maintenance after that probably. But overall it should be fine. Solar panels basically produce less power with cloud cover. And if they aren't mounted properly there might be some storm damage. But otherwise, that should be fine too. Hail would be a bigger challenge than wind. There were some reports of freakishly large hail stones destroying some solar panels a while back.
Mostly, having a lot of decentralized power generation in the form of wind turbines and solar panels all over the place is a good idea from a resilience point of view.
