3 ms·

x0 can also happen due to equipment failure, eg. if there was extreme heat that put all of the inverters into safety shutdown. Again, we aren't dealing with day

x0 can also happen due to equipment failure, eg. if there was extreme heat that put all of the inverters into safety shutdown. Again, we aren't dealing with day-to-day, we're dealing with the 0.1% chance scenarios. These are what make renewables expensive when we're trying to supply high availability power. The problem with the global grid is that it would need to be similarly overprovisioned so that during low-probability failure scenarios the few remaining power nodes could supply the entire thing. 10x overprovisioning here looks a lot more expensive.

ben_w 4y ago
> x0 can also happen due to equipment failure Is trivially true, and applies to everything. It's not really worth bothering to mention because everything else also sufferers this. > The problem with the global grid is that it would need to be similarly overprovisioned so that during low-probability failure scenarios the few remaining power nodes could supply the entire thing. The need to over-provision a grid is obvious, but… > 10x overprovisioning here looks a lot more expensive. First: Why do that by a factor of x10? Best redundancy here is geographical diversity rather than a fatter… I was going to say "cable", but it is (or collectively, they are) the order of a few square meters cross section and that feels wrong as a name. But that thing is best spread out, not kept singular and made wider, whatever you call it. Second: Even x10, the main limit is "that's a lot of stuff to mine, how do we reorganise the miners from coal and oil to metals" rather than the $ cost — while "a trillion" of anything is a lot for one person to contemplate, compared to the cost of what is currently dug up and then set on fire to provide the same power, it's quite cheap.