| > because the incentive to build more capacity is very low, The incentive for new gas generation is the same as for new solar generation: selling electricity profitably on the grid. If you are saying that new gas generation has trouble competing with batteries and solar, I would agree. I would go further and say that new solar and batteries are cheaper than merely the fuel and operating costs of many existing fossil fuel plants. Especially coal. And a lot of gas too, particularly the peaker plants that burn for short amounts of time to capture price spikes on the market. > Very reliable inertial generators (turbines) smooth over the unstable electrical from wind turbines or solar. There's two very different concepts here: inertial generators for frequency regulation and supplying reactive power, which solar does not generate natively, but is now with grid-forming inverters. Also, batteries have been serving frequency regulation for more than a decade, starting in the PJM market. The need for inertial generation has been replaced even with very old and expensive battery technology. The second concept of "reliable" is dispatchable power: can you put power on the grid when it's needed? Batteries also solve this, and are being deployed, profitably, in Texas, as opposed to new gas generation. > As far as battery capacity goes, that's also sketchy because ERCOT is allowing dangerous risky lithium packs to be installed in a tightly packed together industrial space optimized way that could result in disaster when one unit catches fire, spreading to the whole site. That's a fairly minor implementation detail, and the installers are taking on all that risk on their own, as they will lose everything if there's a fire that spreads. A battery going up in smoke is still far better than the amounts of natural gas that get burned in its place. > Better would be magnetically suspended flywheels in a hard vacuum buried under ground. These are more ecological and have the same baseband quality as a turbine constant spin generator, and require very little energy to up-keep. I would say a hybrid way of having these flywheels in large numbers with on-site lithium batteries to provide site power, and line-leveling as the relays switch over to the flywheels, similar to how batteries in a data center last just long enough to let the diesel gen spin up... Flywheels are a completely impractical technology that doesn't scale and is far too expensive. Especially in vacuum underground. Inverters are a far better solution than fly-wheels: cheaper, more battle-tested, actually deployed in practice instead of just in the lab, and widespread. |
There are good ways to do this but using small communities in another state as R&D isn’t one of them.