> What you've forgotten here is that doubling or tripling the carrying capacity of electrical infrastructure isn't a trivial task. This has been studied recent

> What you've forgotten here is that doubling or tripling the carrying capacity of electrical infrastructure isn't a trivial task. This has been studied recently, and the supposedly numbers aren't crazy: > The increase in transmission needs as renewable electricity supply grows, for all 80%-by-2050 renewable electricity scenarios, result in an average annual projected transmission and interconnection investment that is within the recent historical range for total investor-owned utility transmission expenditures in the United States (i.e., $2 billion/yr to $9 billion/yr from 1995 through 2008) (Pfeifenberger et al. 2009). > New transmission in the high renewable electricity scenarios was found to be concentrated in the middle and southwestern regions of the United States, mainly to access the high-quality wind and solar resources in those regions and to deliver generation from those resources to load centers. * https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy13osti/52409-ES.pdf https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy13osti/52409-ES.pdf * https://www.nrel.gov/analysis/re-futures.html https://www.nrel.gov/analysis/re-futures.html See "Volume 4: Bulk Electric Power Systems: Operations and Transmission Planning": * https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy12osti/52409-4.pdf https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy12osti/52409-4.pdf December 2020 study from Princeton, "Net-Zero America" by 2050: * https://www.princeton.edu/news/2020/12/15/big-affordable-effort-needed-america-reach-net-zero-emissions-2050-princeton-study https://www.princeton.edu/news/2020/12/15/big-affordable-eff... * https://environmenthalfcentury.princeton.edu/ https://environmenthalfcentury.princeton.edu/ There are cost estimates for various scenarios: some or zero natgas, some or zero nuclear, mostly or all renewable. Summary news report of the study: * https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/15/race-to-zero-america-emissions-climate-crisis https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/15/race-to-zero...