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Comment by lazide | Hacker News Reader

That’s BS. For several reasons.

1) grid connections fail sometimes. Do you want people freezing to death in NY when the Texas interconnect goes down for a day or two, or vice versa?

2) regional storms (Florida hurricanes, NY ice storms, etc), periodically take out large swathes of grid and would take out grid interconnections too.

Currently, the scope of the impact of these things is quite limited because everyone also has regional capacity.

But if you’re in a giant storm, you’d be super screwed and the whole region would be blacked out for awhile, because renewables also are impacted by these storms - far more than a gas turbine, for instance.

And that’s not even counting demand spikes and the like due to weather issues (longer than usual hot or cold, etc.)

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> Do you want people freezing to death

Have you ever had a useful discussion after accusing the other side of wanting to kill people?

It is a legitimate risk of your proposal.

Did you reply to the correct comment? I didn't propose anything.

Nuclear power plants also have a low probability catastrophic failure mode. If it was a risk we’d engineer to mitigate it.

The referenced plan was to explicitly not do so. And ‘happens every decade or so in the US’ is a lot more frequent than meltdowns, and not very far down the tail as far as such things go.

Where is the accusation exactly?

I was pointing out the real risks involved, and asking them if they were ok with them. Statistically, such a plan would result in that outcome pretty quickly.

Personally I just assumed they had no idea, not that they didn’t care.

Roughly 0% of experts behind more renewables and storage agree with you. But maybe you don't realize that, given that you'd driven them away with this style of argument.

Really, 100% of experts think we need only a few hours of storage and reserve if we connect all the grids?

Cites appreciated! I currently see zero.

No, no one said that but you.

It was literally the comment I originally replied to.

You replied to

> I heard recently of a study that found 2-4 hours is sufficient along with an interconnected grid.

That, literally, is not the same as:

> Really, 100% of experts think we need only a few hours of storage and reserve if we connect all the grids?

Again, you're not going to have a good conversation if you keep on doing this.

I take it I hurt your feelings?

Tell me where those two statements you quoted are materially different (keeping in mind I was including the 0% of experts reply later), if you’d like to continue. Or don’t.

I don't see the difference either*. I would also appreciate you elaborating.

* The parts describing the grid look the same to me, and the percent of experts came from you, when you said 0% of experts agreed with their skepticism.

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