It’s an ad hominem too. How many times I post has nothing to do with what others post, nor with whether the posts are valid or not.

All you do it for is to berate me and poison the well because, well, frankly, you don’t think too good and can’t come up with anything that survives outside your cavernously empty skull.

Yes, that was my initial reaction to the Stocks quote too.

I tend to think that a combination of very large scale CSP and thermal storage with HVDC for long-distance export is going to be a big part of the energy transition.

And hydropower was used massively to back up nukes since a single nuke was much bigger than a single other type of power station so if it went out it would do so in minutes and the only source big enough to respond that fast is hydro. It can’t operate for all that long, but it only has to last long enough to bring up slower plants and execute rolling blackouts if there really isn’t enough to go round.

But actually, you could simply add a resistance heating system to such a plant, so that on a cloudy day, excess wind-generated electricity could be used to heat the existing storage fluid. That’s as close to 100% efficiency as you can get.

Speaking of energy storage, in South Africa we’re a water stressed country, so we have a lot of dams, so we use pumped storage.
If there is a sudden drop in demand, there is still a lot of spare energy in the power plants, even if they switch some of them off. What they do to save energy is pump water up from a lower dam to a higher dam. When energy is needed again, the water in the higher dam is released and run through turbines to generate power.
Now, I know this isn’t always practical or possible, but it could be adapted for solar power stations and the like.

This guy Stocks, who is supposedly a research engineer, says:

“One of the big challenges for solar thermal as a storage tool is that it can only store heat. If there is an excess of electricity in the system because the wind is blowing strong, it cannot efficiently use it to store electrical power to shift the energy to times of shortage, unlike batteries and pumped hydro,” he said..

But actually, you could simply add a resistance heating system to such a plant, so that on a cloudy day, excess wind-generated electricity could be used to heat the existing storage fluid. That’s as close to 100% efficiency as you can get.

(Obviously you work out the cost/benefit based on projections of local weather conditions, but certainly there would be locations where it could work,)

And please note that when you make the wind turbine, you are no longer calling it “per kwh” since when building you are not producing anything, so any CO2 produced, even a sparrow’s fart, is infinite CO2 per kwh.

Hence that report is lifecycle. And rather depends on a whole slew of assumptions any of which can be disputed or wrong going forward.

But if you do per kwh, then you know it’s basically when 100% of the generator is fueled 100% of the time, so you need to include CO2 per kwh of fuel. And the assertion is therefore much less open to fiddling and misrepresentation.