Yet again, the article focuses on the wrong thing. The biggest problem with “the grid” is not power production, clean or dirty. The biggest weakness of the system is not supply but transport, followed closely by storage.
With electricity comes heat. In moments of high demand power lines become hot triggering a temporary shutdown of the line while it cools. Not doing so well trigger a failure which is a long downtime in a best case scenario. This is even worse during high heat events. A lot of our power line infrastructure is very old and was designed for a fraction of the load it has to sustain now, much less future demand. Because of this you end up with power plant capacity going unused while at the same time the grid is overtaxed.
This brings up the idea of storage. If production capacity of a power plant can’t be consumed at that moment, it would be nice if we could store that excess power in giant batteries in order to ensure continuity of service. We don’t do much of that either.
Still, almost every article of this type focuses on production while ignoring storage and distribution, which in turn lead to waste and unreliable service.
Yet again, the article focuses on the wrong thing. The biggest problem with “the grid” is not power production, clean or dirty. The biggest weakness of the system is not supply but transport, followed closely by storage.
With electricity comes heat. In moments of high demand power lines become hot triggering a temporary shutdown of the line while it cools. Not doing so well trigger a failure which is a long downtime in a best case scenario. This is even worse during high heat events. A lot of our power line infrastructure is very old and was designed for a fraction of the load it has to sustain now, much less future demand. Because of this you end up with power plant capacity going unused while at the same time the grid is overtaxed.
This brings up the idea of storage. If production capacity of a power plant can’t be consumed at that moment, it would be nice if we could store that excess power in giant batteries in order to ensure continuity of service. We don’t do much of that either.
Still, almost every article of this type focuses on production while ignoring storage and distribution, which in turn lead to waste and unreliable service.