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Unfortunately, all of those mitigation techniques have problems of their own. (Not to mention that you glossed right over the politics.) With AC power, bigger grids can create instabilities. Look at the 2005 Java–Bali blackout, for instance. Cascading failure. Or the Northeast blackout. Cascading failure. Etc.(With DC power, you have the same thing, but to a lesser extent. Among other things, you need less failsafes for DC than with AC, and it's easier to bootstrap the grid.) You can avoid this by... making grids less interdependent. Which you cannot do if you're tying them together for purposes of keeping them running. (And smart grids mean that things go wrong more badly when they do go bad.) Lots of wind turbines geographically distributed would be great - except, of course, that wind power isn't available everywhere. Remember, the power carried by wind scales roughly as the cube of the windspeed. There's a relatively small window of "enough, but not too much" where wind power makes sense. Ditto - pumped hydro I talked about, but again, you have to have a watershed with enough capacity. Which isn't the case everywhere. Demand management... Good luck with that. That's politics, as much as anything. We have come to expect reliable power, and trying to convince people otherwise is an uphill battle, as it is very much a regression. And as for small-scale gas-burning plants... Two things. First, by the time you've added up the wind turbines (again, wind turbines are hideous for the environment to make!), the additional infrastructure required to be able to inject power safely at distributed points, the additional infrastructure for a smart grid, and the gas-burning plants, things look much less obvious. And secondly, gas-burning plants are either inefficient or don't scale fast enough to be worth it. Oh, and they are expensive. It may be better to sink the absurd amounts of money that is required for wind (especially when you realize that gas-burning plants are really expensive for their energy output) elsewhere. |
The first person to suggest building the electrical grids we already have would have seemed a bit of a visionary, because they are truly epic bits of engineering but lots of problems have been solved along the way and continue to need solved as thing evolve.
Throwing your hands up at the first hint of potential problems is basically a variant on the FUD we know so well in computing, as is claiming wind turbines are "hideous" for the environment. People love that old switcheroo, "electric cars are worse for the environment than ICE cars", "Solar panels use more carbon than they will ever save" etc. except when you look at the serious studies done by actual experts you find these questions were dealt with thoroughly years before, and the people who keep repeating them aren't interested in facts.
Wind turbines aren't magic fairy dust, they're technology. They can be used well, they can be used badly, they can get better. One of the big changes is that larger turbines can be deployed successfully in lots more places and take advantage of slower average windspeeds. That's not revolutionary, but that and thousands of other improvements are making wind and solar cheaper every day. The problems that remain are far more solvable, and cost-efficient to deal with, than dealing with the consequences of continuing to pump carbon into the atmosphere.
Many nations are already building/converting gas generators just to avoid using coal, an on balance this is a good thing from a pollution and carbon perspective. Making use of stuff that already exists to plug gaps as we go forward really isn't that radical a suggestion.