4 ms·

We currently still depend on a lot of gas plants yes, but we are working on battery storage: https://www.energy-storage.news/semperpower-starts-operations-on-6

• realusername 3y ago
  That's a rounding error if you really wanted to move the production from the summer to the winter. Nobody does it because that's not feasible with the current tech. At best you smooth out the daily production.
  • ben_w 3y ago
    You don't need to shift all the energy from the long days in the summer to the long nights in the winter. The cheapest solution varies depending on how close you are to the arctic circle, but for most of the world's population the best is to have a bit more generation capacity than you need on a winter's day combined with a mere few days worth of storage. This is about x100 less energy storage than shifting from summer to winter, at a cost of x3 in generation, and generation is still the cheaper part of the two. Close to the arctic circle, the only solution is a power line to somewhere further south; this is much cheaper than the nay-sayers claim (in $ terms even a planet-spanning 1 Ω grid is only about $265 billion), but is still a political PITA.