1) grid connections fail sometimes. Do you want people freezing to death in NY when the Texas interconnect goes down for a day or two, or vice versa?
2) regional storms (Florida hurricanes, NY ice storms, etc), periodically take out large swathes of grid and would take out grid interconnections too.
Currently, the scope of the impact of these things is quite limited because everyone also has regional capacity.
But if you’re in a giant storm, you’d be super screwed and the whole region would be blacked out for awhile, because renewables also are impacted by these storms - far more than a gas turbine, for instance.
And that’s not even counting demand spikes and the like due to weather issues (longer than usual hot or cold, etc.)
I was pointing out the real risks involved, and asking them if they were ok with them. Statistically, such a plan would result in that outcome pretty quickly.
Personally I just assumed they had no idea, not that they didn’t care.
Roughly 0% of experts behind more renewables and storage agree with you. But maybe you don't realize that, given that you'd driven them away with this style of argument.
Tell me where those two statements you quoted are materially different (keeping in mind I was including the 0% of experts reply later), if you’d like to continue. Or don’t.
I don't see the difference either*. I would also appreciate you elaborating.
* The parts describing the grid look the same to me, and the percent of experts came from you, when you said 0% of experts agreed with their skepticism.
The referenced plan was to explicitly not do so. And ‘happens every decade or so in the US’ is a lot more frequent than meltdowns, and not very far down the tail as far as such things go.
