> This is the "keep maintaining the existing natural gas plants even though they're hardly ever used" which is unreasonably expensive. Not all of them. A small

> This is the "keep maintaining the existing natural gas plants even though they're hardly ever used" which is unreasonably expensive. Not all of them. A small fraction. > Weather is regional. You could very easily have calm air in an entire region of the country for an extended period of time. Even if you had long-distance transmission, where do you get the capacity? From other regions with different weather patterns. > And the generators in another part of the country would be a different kind -- you would use a higher proportion of solar in the US southwest and a higher proportion of wind in the midwest. Exactly, you build in each place what it's best suited for. > If it's calm in winter in the midwest, you need power for heating at night and solar generators in the Mojave with short winter days aren't going to do it. So you pull from the rest of the country as well. That's what a national grid is for. Every place ends up with some capacity to overproduce, so when a given region has 50% of what it needs, it pulls 10% from 5 places each. > To actually do this you would have to massively overbuild generating capacity of the type opposite what that region is suited for Why opposite? > This is supposed to be the cheapest option? Sure. Renewables are cheaper than nuclear. So overbuilding solar and wind is still cost competitive. At this point solar is less than half the price of nuclear. Which means if you thought nuclear is a good idea, then overbuilding solar still saves you money.