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Leesburg, Ohio | Histark, the cost of "backup generation" for coal and gas, and for that matter, nukes and hydro, IS ACCOUNTED FOR, in the embedded cost of those DISPATCHABLE generation facilities. We all pay for that in the normal cost of electric generation.
All generation methods have downtime. The problem with wind and solar, is the downtime is HUGE compared to the downtime for traditional methods of generation.
At any given moment, there is handful of coal or gas plants offline for maintenance and repair. But that number is a tiny percentage of the coal and gas plants running in any region of the country, thus allowing the grid to stay powered across the region...essentially it is "self backup" capability built into the system because of the numbers of plants still running, and not dependent on the wind or the sun.
With wind and solar, huge numbers of those generators of offline any time the wind is not blowing or the sun is not shining.
Unlike coal and gas plants, there are not, and likely never will be enough windmills in a particular region to provide the "self-backup" capability, and certainly no solar backup capability at all, at night.
Some say, "well, all that needs to happen is just transfer huge amounts of power through the grid from one end of the country to the other...the whole country is never out of power. Not possible, Our grid is not designed for transporting power over distances that far at that capacity.
TO answer your specific point here, the backup capability is already figured in the cost of the coal/gas plant. It is in the budget for planned and emergency maintenance downtime.
When wind/solar is not operating, there MUST be coal/gas/nuke/hydro/something reliable in waiting to take the place of filling demand for the power not being generated by wind/solar.
Thus, we have the DUPLICATION of costs for backup to wind and solar that is already BUILT IN to the costs of coal/gas/nuke/hydro.
Here is the cold, hard fact: Coal/gas/nuke/hydro is UN-INTERRUPTIBLE (DISPATCHABLE) power. Wind/solar is ONLY INTERRUPTIBLE (NON-dispatchable) power. | |
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“The Impossible dream of replacing the convenience of fossil powered with EVs”
