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Comment by thechao | Hacker News Reader

I'm trying to imagine the apocalyptic scenario that'd have all of Texas windless and cloudy for a week? Nameplate values for Texas wind & solar will eventually be well above peak required: excess power can be sold for silly things like bitcoin, desalination, fabbing, etc.

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Right now wind is running at 16% capacity producing 6GW; you'd need ~308GW capacity to cover Texas needs from wind alone. Good luck.

That is why there is also solar

And there is also night. And clouds. Texas is good for solar but December and January still have relatively high variance - for example, in December 13 solar produced only 19.3 GWh while it produced 103 GWh two weeks later on December 27.

No single source has ever provided all electricity for any major region. To pretend otherwise is disingenuous.

Fossil fuels have done that trick, long before gridscale wind and solar ever existed.

So really you're the one being disingenuous.

Fossil Fuels aren't all one thing. There are different types, with vastly different infrastructures, etc.

Coal is not natural gas

Bitcoin sounds like the absolute worst thing to buy with excess electrical production. But desalination sounds like an excellent thing to buy. Silly is not the word I'd use.

The best thing to buy is just battery energy storage (or molten salt or hydro-pumped). Storage prices are falling even faster than the solar PV modules themselves, and there are dozens of huge factories being built every year, in the USA as well.

It seems like desalination is discussed on HN frequently but I have yet to see tech that makes any financial sense, even with somewhat cheaper power.

Winter Storm Uri came pretty close to that. Very overcast every day. Pretty low wind compared to normal. I'm not blaming wind or solar for the failures; it was largely failures in gas production. But solar and wind output weren't close to their nameplate capacity.

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