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No it isn’t. Electricity has to be delivered the instant it is consumed. You can pile up capital.
by FredPret 4y ago
No it isn’t. Electricity has to be delivered the instant it is consumed. You can pile up capital.
- Zigurd 4y agoStorage in the form of batteries, pumped storage, hydrogen, or ammonia works. It is needed more for renewables than for nuclear, but nuclear is hard to throttle to a fine granularity like fossil fuel plants. Anyway, I should have said power generating capacity is mostly fungible. You can mostly replace any capacity with a different kind, within some limits, the same way money isn't perfectly fungible if you need currency conversion, have FDI limits, repatriation limits, etc.
- FredPret 4y agoSo a reasonable engineer would then conclude the practical route to a green grid is nuclear baseload + natural gas peaking + solar and windmills. Storage is nowhere near practical today. A house can barely run off batteries. How about mines, factories, aluminum smelters. In future it would be great if this changed.