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A comment on US Electricity Markets Aren't Designed to Handle 100% Clean Energy. Parent comment

Re:US Electricity Markets Aren't Designed to Handle 100% Cle... by fencepost on Tuesday July 02, 2019 @01:10PM (#20337139)
It's not expensive to build or operate as long as everything goes right. If and when things go wrong it may be so expensive that dealing with it requires major resources. IIRC, nuclear plants are all basically government insured because there's no insurance company or set of companies that could underwrite the potential losses from a catastrophic failure.

Living only expecting things to go right means that cities don't need to worry about backups and hardened networks.

It's when things go wrong that you end up with an HBO series a few decades later.

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Re:US Electricity Markets Aren't Designed to Handle 100% Cle... by heimatau on Tuesday July 02, 2019 @01:19PM (#20337237)
> It's not expensive to build or operate as long as everything goes right. If and when things go wrong it may be so expensive that dealing with it requires major resources.

Say that to France. Stop buying the propaganda. HBO series has warning signs. Chernobyl and Fukushima were grossly mismanagement and ignored the glaring issues. France has never had the problem.

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Re:US Electricity Markets Aren't Designed to Handle 100% Cle... by fencepost on Tuesday July 02, 2019 @01:37PM (#20337431)
"Gross mismanagement" is an easy diagnosis after the fact. During the time in which the decisions were being made they probably made perfect sense, at least given the knowledge and constraints the decision makers were working with.

With some notable high profile exceptions people don't go into things with the intention of completely screwing them up.

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Re:US Electricity Markets Aren't Designed to Handle 100% Cle... by heimatau on Tuesday July 02, 2019 @01:41PM (#20337483)
If the issue is brought up to management more than 3 times then yes, it's gross mismanagement and could be solved.

Which is why I provide France as a counter-example. They aren't mismanaging the potential issues. It's a solvable problem and France is continually demonstrating it.

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