Post #1087551

@robhawkes That sounds absurd but only until you start running numbers. The actual reason for running on gas and curtailing wind is that granted how many days per year the north actually generates 5 GW it’s likely cheaper to waste that energy than build a 5 GW grid connector that would be idling for most of the year. I’m not even sure if there are grids that allow such power to be moved, the largest I’ve seen in Poland was 2 GW and it’s like a highway (in literal sense of land occupied). That’s the cost of variable renewables that nobody mentions when they argue that “wind always blows somewhere”. Mark Z. Jacobson mastered this kind of manipulative modeling by burying a tiny “the model assumes perfect grid” in his papers. It’s also not captured by LCOE. It is however captured by LFSCOE (levelized full-system cost of energy).