Science:

Why People In Europe Are Worried About The Biggest Solar Eclipse In 15 Years (ThinkProgress)

On Friday morning, March 20, a solar eclipse will sweep across Europe. This rare aligning of the sun, moon, and Earth will cause the standard delays and hazards as onlookers get distracted by the unusual sky and the darkness it casts. But this time around, there is a new cause for concern: solar power.

What happens if it knocks out 75 percent of some country’s power for an hour? You’d need a lot of backup to cover for that — from storage, wind, biomass, geothermal, or, if the grid is up for it, power brought in from regions outside the eclipse.

California, a longtime U.S. leader in renewable energy production, is preparing for this reality by “having a suite of renewables,” according to Albert Lundeen with the California Energy Commission.

“The possibility of outages resulting from a solar eclipse underscores the importance of having a portfolio approach to the development of renewable resources, as California has done,” Lundeen told ThinkProgress, who said the state’s policies have always focused on using diversity to reduce the risks inherent with overdependence on any one source of energy.

“Variable renewable resources like solar or wind can be balanced with other resources like geothermal, biomass, and hydroelectric which can operate much more like a conventional fossil plant in terms of providing reliable, 24-7 energy,” said Lundeen.

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