A Place in the Sun

One of the greatest barriers to the continued deployment of renewable energy generation is intermittency: variations in output caused by external factors. Some renewables, such as tidal power, are variable but in an entirely predictable way (two or four times a day). Other sources, wind for example, vary widely from day to day, and from minute to minute, and some systems, such as solar power, combine elements of regular variation (day and night) with more random variations (cloud cover).