Comment by zdragnar
14 hours ago
That's every single winter where I live in the US. We don't have a word for it like the Germans do, though, we just call it January.
14 hours ago
That's every single winter where I live in the US. We don't have a word for it like the Germans do, though, we just call it January.
The good news is: you're on a national (or semi-national) grid, and conditions like that are more unusual than they are common across the USA.
You want us to transport energy 1500 miles? Cold, dark winters cover enormous swathes of the US - inconveniently, often at similar times. So what - we're turning Florida into a solar park so the rest of the nation can use that while they're dark?
Our energy grid can't currently handle the ability to charge electric haulers locally at any scale let alone to move an entire city's worth of energy, so the solution is not to 85x the national electric grid all at once.
I used to think the people who took this "America is too incompetent to make the green transition" stance were just downplaying the tech out of some combination of ignorance and weird partisan logic.
But to give them due credit, they believed in this vision and put in the hard work to make sure it became true.
Serious citation needed that there are week-long stretches of continuous wind-free heavy cloud covering thousand mile stretches of the United States.
Also, it’s weird to talk about Florida when, say, Arizona and Utah, etc. are right there. Even Wyoming despite being further north has over half of the month sunny in the winter. One thing to remember is that we could power the entire country using solar with a fraction of the land currently used to produce corn for ethanol so we don’t even need to substantially change land use, just stop subsidizing inefficient fuel generation.
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the US regularly wastes money on its military and fights wars around the world, causing misery for millions.
If the US decided to divert half of the Pentagon's annual budget to electricity, the US could absolutely build the infrastructure to transport electricity thousands of kilometres.
> You want us to transport energy 1500 miles?
That's literally CCP state controlled communism !! More specifically, that's what the Gansu–Zhejiang UHVDC project has as an overhead transmission line length (2,370 km in international units).
* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014206152...
* https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20241113-will-chinas-ultr...
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