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What you say makes sense to me. OTOH, I get the impression that some of our infrastructure has a financial incentive to eliminate any reserve capacity. E.g., th
by CoastalCoder 5y ago
What you say makes sense to me. OTOH, I get the impression that some of our infrastructure has a financial incentive to eliminate any reserve capacity. E.g., that snowstorm in Texas last(?) winter.
So I'm curious if having any non-trivial amount of electricity supplied by a usually-reliable mechanism becomes a long-term risk.
- sudhirj 5y agoThere's actually some automatic de-risking with renewables because of their semi-unpredictable nature. If you have a coal, gas or nuclear plant that runs reliably, some executive will get a bonus if they cut costs by shutting off all the redundancies. If you cost-cut redundancies with renewables, though, you'll hit a cloudy or non-windy day before bonus time comes around, and then you'll have a new executive who gets a bonus if they have reasonable redundancies. So there's some resiliency that comes from intermittent renewables, like having a chaos monkey always running on the grid.