Comment by whizzter
5 hours ago
There's one case, rural areas often have abundant energy sources (hydro, wind,etc) but few consumers, in Northern Sweden f.ex. a lot is produced but there's a lot of losses in transporting the energy south.
Now, yes, as long as natural gas is cheap(inbetween US or Soviet wars) it'll probably be the core for hydrogen, however batteries won't help much in the north since the transmission rather than usage is the cap even with batteries so excess production could be redirected towards hydrogen production.
If solar continues to plummet in cost we may see distributed industry in rural areas, to take advantage of energy that is essentially stranded by transmission cost. Storage becomes even more important in this scenario.
Well, unless all the planned datacentres get built, using more electricity than some small countries.
The blockage of connecting those to the grid will encourage self-generation, which will mean putting them off in the boondocks where land is cheap. Taking that to the logical limit is where space data centers come from.
I think we're going to see a repurposing of remote coal-fired plants with renewable stored heat. The Four Corners plant, perhaps? It's supposed to stop operating in 2031, I believe.
In the US, this will never happen due to NIMBY zoning laws.
Most rural areas have pretty permissive zoning.
But also, other than Texas, I don't hear about a lot of regional over production. There's pretty good interconnection within and between the two major grids.