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storage alone will almost never be enough. The electricity is just too important for the modern societies to leave it to chance. You will have events where ther

storage alone will almost never be enough. The electricity is just too important for the modern societies to leave it to chance. You will have events where there will be no wind or sun for weeks. In order to have that many batteries it would require monumental investments. And those batteries would sit unused for years. You need a diverse and distributed generation network, backed by gas burning plants.

yazaddaruvala 6y ago
I mean, gas definitely doesn't *need to* be involved. At that point you're better off with fission. For example, the US is connected north to south in 2 electric grids (TX excludes itself, but is huge). Making all three of those grids large enough that the sun definitely isn't obscured for weeks. Additionally, places like India are talking about building a "world gird" to be the solar power generator for the world.
- flavius29663 6y ago
  it's one thing to interconnect a few GW here and there, but to power the Texas grid you need 80GW or so. That is a humongous amount of power. You would need at least 10-20 HVDC projects that span thousands of miles each. BTW, Texas is already connected to the other grids, but not synchronized, e.g. https://www.tdworld.com/overhead-transmission/article/20964502/abb-replaces-hvdc-link-in-the-united-states https://www.tdworld.com/overhead-transmission/article/209645... As we all know, these kind of connections were not enough during the big freeze. But say you make that investment. That is still not a guarantee that you won't have a continent wide lull without sun or wind. You just can't risk it. It's cheaper and more effective to just install some gas turbines for backup. If you fire them up 2 times a year it won't matter for the CO2 budget.
  - yazaddaruvala 6y ago
    Yeah I think we are on the same page. It’s likely just a difference between thinking 10-30 years out, and thinking 100-300 years out.
    - flavius29663 6y ago
      I don't see how more years make it more likely to have more interconnection. The power requirements will balloon, it might be still cheaper to have some local generators instead of investing in long range transmission

yazaddaruvala 6y ago

I mean, gas definitely doesn't *need to* be involved. At that point you're better off with fission. For example, the US is connected north to south in 2 electric grids (TX excludes itself, but is huge). Making all three of those grids large enough that the sun definitely isn't obscured for weeks. Additionally, places like India are talking about building a "world gird" to be the solar power generator for the world.

flavius29663 6y ago
it's one thing to interconnect a few GW here and there, but to power the Texas grid you need 80GW or so. That is a humongous amount of power. You would need at least 10-20 HVDC projects that span thousands of miles each. BTW, Texas is already connected to the other grids, but not synchronized, e.g. https://www.tdworld.com/overhead-transmission/article/20964502/abb-replaces-hvdc-link-in-the-united-states https://www.tdworld.com/overhead-transmission/article/209645... As we all know, these kind of connections were not enough during the big freeze. But say you make that investment. That is still not a guarantee that you won't have a continent wide lull without sun or wind. You just can't risk it. It's cheaper and more effective to just install some gas turbines for backup. If you fire them up 2 times a year it won't matter for the CO2 budget.
- yazaddaruvala 6y ago
  Yeah I think we are on the same page. It’s likely just a difference between thinking 10-30 years out, and thinking 100-300 years out.
  - flavius29663 6y ago
    I don't see how more years make it more likely to have more interconnection. The power requirements will balloon, it might be still cheaper to have some local generators instead of investing in long range transmission