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Could a highly efficient grid solve the "local weather" problem? While it might be cloudy in Washington, at the same time it's likely sunny in Nevada, or Texas,
by billti 7y ago
Could a highly efficient grid solve the "local weather" problem? While it might be cloudy in Washington, at the same time it's likely sunny in Nevada, or Texas, (or Mexico if you had cross border production), etc..
The broader the area you can depend on, the less you need "bad weather backup" systems.
- godelski 7y agoPotentially. But there's a big if and quite a few drawbacks. If our power is dependent on such long range travel there is a lot more opportunity for failure. Since we're talking about power, this does mean both lives and millions to billions of dollars worth of economic activity. There's various reasons things could go down. A bird. Russia hacking our grid. Joe Schmoe crashes his truck. You name it. The only way to reduce two of these events is to build a large and complex network with many fail-safes, but that makes the second possibility easier. But if it goes down in Texas we're talking about Northern California, Oregon, and Washington potentially losing power. Having local sources of power is highly reliable and contains disasters to only be local. While I do believe we should have smarter grids there is much wanting in using this as a solution to the regional issues of renewable efficiencies and storage requirements.
- cycomanic 7y agoThe answer is yes, there have been studies about this for the US. I'm on mobile now but will try to dig this up later