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Comment by oezi | Hacker News Reader

No, you just need peaker plants which can run for the 1-3 weeks per year when there is no wind in the winter.

Battery capacity will never be built to exceed 1-3 days of demand.

And because they are run so infrequently, they don't need to be fancy or efficient - just cheap and powerful. It's easier than one might imagine, but it helps if you think of scale along the lines that horsepower is roughly comparable to kilowatts, so a 200 horsepower car engine (which is small) can provide 147kW, or enough power to supply around 147 houses on average (depending on a lot of things obviously - in a climate with high heating/cooling demand it won't manage as many houses). It's not uncommon to have single diesel generators capable of generating 4MW of electricity running around on train tracks.

So you need to have two generation systems. Certainly possible, not cheap.

I assume in this conversation that we want:

    * reliable power
    * affordable power

If you relax those assumptions you open up the solution space. It isn't clear to me how much you can relax those assumptions though.

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