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International grid doesn't mean "import whatever is on offer". You can contract for renewable energy, and fund international production capacity. Depending on R
by lkbm 5y ago
International grid doesn't mean "import whatever is on offer". You can contract for renewable energy, and fund international production capacity. Depending on Russian oil was a geopolitical (and environmental) mistake. Depending on French nuclear or Spanish solar seems much safer.
International grid ties also means:
* When it's cloudy or calm, you can import from somewhere sunny or windy. When it's sunny or windy, export to somewhere cloudy and calm. Shortages a thousand miles southwest aren't going to correlate strongly with shortages where you are, and if you if you have multiple sources a thousand miles in each direction you should be able to balance demand far better. Weather conditions are reasonably local. Demand patterns will also vary a bit.
* You can import solar from somewhere sunnier, or sunny at different. You're not going to transmit your electricity 12,000 miles east/west, but Madrid has sunset an hour later than Berlin, and demand tends to be closer to 7pm than 2am.
Yeah, it's a hard engineering problem, and there will be downsides, but we can do it if we seriously commit to it.
- cm2187 5y agoif you look at my response to a sibling comment, I am not convinced there is that much diversification in europe [1]. And you can tell annecdoctically, when you have heatwave news stories in one european countries, you typically get similar stories in other european countries. Europe is not that big geographically. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30934588 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30934588
- lkbm 5y agoWow, thanks for putting together that data! I'm not surprised to see Germany, UK, Norway, Sweden, and Netherlands all be similar, since (I assume) they're all using the North Sea. I am surprised to see Germany's output is so similar to Italy, Portugal, and Greece. It does look like there's a decent separation between places I expect to use the Mediterranean vs. those I'd expect to use the North Sea, but yeah, we likely need a lot of excess capacity, a lot of storage, or a lot of not-wind-or-solar. (Or I guess a lot of flexibility on energy usage.)