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Nope. For about the same cost as the Covid stimulus we could have converted the entire US electrical grid to renewables.
by pirate787 5y ago
Nope. For about the same cost as the Covid stimulus we could have converted the entire US electrical grid to renewables.
- idiotsecant 5y agoThat's not even within an order of magnitude of being true. Renewables are, with some partial exceptions, not dispatchable energy sources - you need massive amounts of storage and transmission capacity. Solar, for example, has a capacity factor in the neighborhood of 10%. That means that for every watt of natural gas generation you want to replace you need 10 watts of geographically distributed solar energy with storage and massively upgraded transmission networks to move all that power around. You could maybe start to work on a china-style HVDC network with that kind of money but that's not even close to all you need to integrate renewables on a massive scale. Fixing the american power grid for the challenges of the next 500 years is a multi-generational project that will cost way more than a few trillion dollars.