Comment by kulahan
14 hours ago
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.
Here's your serious citation - the polar vortex.
These usually drop ambient temperatures across Canada and the northern US to below -20 C, and produce generally high winds. This combination of extreme cold, cloud cover, and high winds last for multiple days, often longer than a week.
The wind plus cold means that many wind turbines cannot operate and the cloud cover and shorter days mean that solar is barely generating any energy.
> 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...
The very decidely non-communist SunZia wind project in SE New Mexico (not too from where I live, and the largest wind generation system in the world at this point) came with a 1600km new grid line connecting it to California (though it is a part of the overall western grid too, and electricity is fungible).
Ahhh, I jested - I accept some in the US have no problem getting it together on collective civil infrastructure projects that benefit many.
The GP might be in the group that don't much like that kind of thing.
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.