[coldpie]

Please double-check my math here. Minnesota delivers about 70,000 million cubic feet of natural gas to customers in the coldest months[1]. 70,000,000,000 cf of NG is about 72,730,000,000,000 BTUs[2]. That's equivalent to 21,315 GWh[3] of energy created by NG per month. Divide that by 31 days and you're looking at 687 GWh of natural gas per day or 29 GW of continuous generation. Minnesota's current entire electricity generation capacity is 17 GW[4], so we're looking at roughly tripling our current capacity. Nearby states are about on the same order, so we would be sucking down a whole lot of their power during low-generation periods. If we want to prepare for 7 days of no electricity generation, we would need 4,809 GWh of energy storage solely for heating, which is about 1600 instances of the currently largest battery-storage system on the planet, just for heating Minnesota.

Some combination of nuclear and solar/wind feels much more realistic to me to meet this demand, than building out that many batteries.

This is all napkin-math-y, so feel free to fudge it up and down a bit. But I just can't get the numbers to feel reasonable to me.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/n3060mn2m.htm

[2] 1 cf ng = 1039 btu https://www.nrg.com/resources/energy-tools/energy-conversion...

[3] https://www.convertunits.com/from/British+thermal+unit/to/gi...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Minn...

[pedrocr]

You've now ignored the simulations others have done, after insisting on those repeatedly, and have started making your own to again conclude solar and wind must not be viable and nuclear necessary. Meanwhile I'm still waiting on any kind of study that says nuclear can be built at anything approaching a viable cost. This is not a reasonable way to discuss something.

[coldpie]

Fair enough, agree to disagree. I do want to say thanks for engaging me on this, and for digging up that study link. This was the most productive conversation I've had about the topic on HN.