Comment by leonidasrup
2 days ago
"Reliability: Five-nines availability (99.999%, under 6 minutes downtime annually), typically achieved by combining high grid reliability with backup generation."
https://speed2power.epri.com/demand-characteristics.html
I wrote software for monitoring and controling electric grids on country level and later software for controling nuclear power plants, I know a little bit about resiliency.
Physicaly, you can do 3X redundancy in electric generation and electric grid, as there are no physical laws against it, but such large infrastructure is expensive and you have to pay the CAPEX even if the infrastructure is almost never utilized. Also transporting electricity over large distances is really expensive, therefor only relative small amount of electricity can be transport in europe and future targets are modest.
"The EU has set an interconnection target of at least 15% by 2030 to encourage EU countries to interconnect their installed electricity production capacity. This means that each country should have electricity infrastructure in place that would allow it to import, from its neighbouring EU countries, an equivalent of at least 15% of the electricity production capacity on its territory."
https://energy.ec.europa.eu/topics/infrastructure/electricit...
https://pubs.rsc.org/ee/article-abstract/11/3/469/565531/Rel...
Someone has to pay for this, either customers or tax payers (through goverment subsidies) and Europe already has high electricity prices (when compared with China and US).
"The energy sector is one of the largest and most important sectors of the world economy. Accounting for 8%–10% of world GDP, it is second only to health care in size and is equally pervasive in scope"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/energy-...
I think you are trying to say something, but I'm not sure what it is. It is not clear what you are advocating for. More nuclear?
Resiliency requires redundancy and that means excess production capacity. It is now mostly peaker gas plants that run only a few hours a day at most. Instead, solar panels are dirt cheap and you can have lots of redundancy pretty cheap. There are many uses for excess energy, it can be used for green hydrogen (industrial heat) and green ammonia (fertilizer) or pump water back if there is hydro. Most importantly, Europe has ~460 million vehicles, all of these can be EVs and have flexible demand. People are creative and they will find many uses with time-of-use pricing.
As a civilization, we're only just getting started on solar. So far, its been horizontal panels to capture when the Sun is brightest. The next phase is vertical solar. It requires zero land and can be deployed anywhere, think of all the fences and walls and tall buildings. It can be deployed in cities, close to consumption, without requiring new transmission infrastructure. Vertical solar will add 4 hours solar production. And Europe is geographically a large area, ~3400 miles wide, which means with grid interconnect, you can add 4 more hours excess production, ship to the other countries and get paid.
Or you can do what Romania does and install Solar with batteries: https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Solar-Energy/Solar-P.... If a poor Eastern European country can figure out how to build renewables, I'm sure its not a hard task for Western Europe?
> I wrote software for monitoring and controling electric grids on country level and later software for controling nuclear power plants, I know a little bit about resiliency.
You have a fixed worldview, the grid is an unchangeable fixed structure, and it can never be changed because you wrote a bit of software in COBOL 50 years back. What happened in your 20s is the best and ideal grid and it should never change. In your age of fossil fuel, production was far away, needed transmission infrastructure to bring power to the cities. Because coal is extremely polluting, hydro is geo-fixed and nuclear needs to be far (nobody will allow it). None of those assumptions are true anymore.