Hacker News Reader

We have that in Sweden. The problem is distributing it. Most energy in Sweden is produced up north, but the infrastructure to transfer it south is lacking which (especially this winter) is resulting in ridiculously uneven kW/h prices in our country.

Just to clarify. This is pretty much all hydro and not wind, big wind parks in northern Sweden will be built though.

But building put transfer capacity is a known quantity.

I would think energy storage is harder to solve than building more transfer capacity?

It's very hard to estimate the realistic minimum wind generation for an entire grid, I believe (same goes for solar). Sure, 0 wind for 1 month across an entire country is unrealistic, but how low could it go, and for how long, and how often would such an event happen?

You can't just leave critical infrastructure like power generation up to chance, even for once-in-a-century events. You must always have some kind of buffer to make sure there is no chance you will have to shut down industry and hospitals for a week (barring maybe war conditions).

What if you need energy when there isn’t much wind?

One of these things is orders of magnitude more complicated than the other.