Re: Grand Apagon - Electricity (not) in Spain

On Tue, 29 Apr 2025 17:07:10 -0700, Don Y
<blockedofcourse@foo.invalid> wrote:

Or, just solar "farms"?

 
They can drop out entire blocks of switchgear to take a given region or zone
offline (as would happen if a fault condition trips a breaker).
 
The big problem on a really sunny day is that an individual house roof 4kW PV
installation in late afternoon in the UK will be potentially exporting all of
it to the grid. That is about 20-30 houses worth of electricity for each solar
roof.

>
Huh?  A single residential PV is enough to *power* 20 homes?
A 4-5KW installation would barely cover the home on which
it was sited.
>
E.g., our "average" (24/7) load is about 1KW.  Of course, that
neglects the peaks that we see OFTEN throughout the daylight
hours (night load is relatively small -- a few LED lights
plus my computers)

Some people have air conditioners and electric tea kettles.

I think some people have "electric fires", namely resistive space
heating. Maybe horribly inefficient electric water heaters.

Most of our heat comes from natural gas, which is very reliable.

But yes, one rooftop solar powering 30 houses is not reasonable.