Comment by hurril

I am a non-hater of renewables. I add this because in plenty of _your_ circles, you are either all in on renewables or you are a coal thumper, basically. I am neither. We need to add nuance by complicating this conversation.

The main problem of renewables is that it is intermittent and that fact remains to be solved. I want this solved or at least improved because it is the bottleneck. In fact, it is such a bottleneck that its energy generation factor is noted as 1:10, i.e.: a power plant rated at 100MW, registers as 10MW in comparison to nuclear and hydro (and obviously coal and gas.) So this means that to add a 1MW worth of energy generation to the grid, 10MW must be built.

Another problem that hits wind farms is that when there's wind blowing somewhere, it tends to blow everywhere, or some large area. So suddenly there is too much energy want to flow in to the grid which hits the core of the problem with grids at this point because energy that is inserted into it, must be extracted to the exact same magnitude at the same time. So a 100GW demand must be met by 100.0GW production. Now if 110GW is produced, something _MUST_ consume it, so there are two choices:

1. make someone consume it, i.e., sell it to them. They have to buy it so the price will drop until there are enough buyers and this does not stop at 0, prices will go in to the negative. So the market will pay you to use electricity. The market. Or:

2. shut off the power plants until we are back at 100GW (or whatever can be met by consumption.)

3. there is also a catastrophic third option. If you have a situation where too much energy (read power if you want to) is inserted into the grid, then its frequency will rise, this damages the infrastructure and connected consumers, so they will get disconnected. Read large and broad power outages. These situations are also non-trivial to recover from. I.e.: to "restart the grid" afterwards. See what happened in Spain last(?) year.

How do you run a power plant in a market that demands payment to accept the energy you want to sell? You cannot. So this is the windfarm paradox, feel free to compare to Russel's paradox. It goes something like this:

A windfarm makes money whenever the wind blows because only then does it have energy to sell.

A windfarm cannot make money whenefer the wind blows because then the market price goes to zero.

So a windfarm makes money when the wind blows and does not blow at the same time.

To solve this problem, energy consumption must be made capable of also being intermittent. Either run "factories" intermittently, which might very well be part of the solution. And/ or, have huge accumulation capacity in the grid that can swallow the over generation.

TLDR: renewables is the easy answer but very hard thing to do. The hard answer is the one I have given, together with getting more nuclear going which is difficult and expensive. But.. what can we do?