4 ms·
unlike solar, geographic diversity in wind goes a long way toward addressing intermittency. anyone who's ever build a server cluster or a DR plan knows the sol
by cagenut 7y ago
unlike solar, geographic diversity in wind goes a long way toward addressing intermittency. anyone who's ever build a server cluster or a DR plan knows the solution to higher availability is to just leave some spare capacity on the table. when wind costs 1/3rd of nuclear, and has half the capacity factor, well the math is not hard.
nuclear reactors are mainframes. gas plants are ibm/hp/sun. on-shore and off-shore wind are windows and linux on intel. solar is cell phones.
we never got rid of mainframes. they are still built and sold today. but no amount of arguing about their technical superiority in the 80s would have put you on the right side of that bet.
- steeve 7y ago> geographic diversity in wind goes a long way toward addressing intermittency This is unfortunately not true. Taking the whole Europe, either the wind blows everywhere, or it doesn't [1]. 1. https://www.vive-le-nucleaire-heureux.com/images/Textes-blog/2018-08-18/07.jpg https://www.vive-le-nucleaire-heureux.com/images/Textes-blog...
- pstuart 7y agoI'm pro wind and solar, but also believe that nuclear could and should be part of the mix as well. To extend your mainframe analogy, nuclear should be whitebox PCs. Make the plants smaller, cheaper, modular, and designed for easier maintenance and disposal.