Civilization grows with available energy. People would start desalinating the oceans to green deserts, speed-boat cargo around the world, grow staple foods indoors or pull carbon out of the air if energy were truly free.
As you surely know, that's been said before, mostly about nuclear fusion and fission breeder reactors, both of which have inexhaustible resources. What's different this time? There's still absolutely massive amounts of major equipment needed in a wind/solar dominated energy system.
> “Our story for gas plants is, if you build it, they won’t run -- they won’t run at their expected capacity factors,” said Mark Dyson, who co-wrote both reports. “And that filters down to pipelines, too.”
I suspect that the demand for electricity will mean that we'll need gas plants much longer than the article believes.
This will be a good thing, because electric cars and heat pumps running off of natural gas generators is much less carbon than gasoline cars and natural gas furnaces.
So even if it were free to generate electricity--solar panels and batteries were free--you would only see a 40-45% decrease in your electricity bill.
Such numbers would be useful for determining a theoretical floor for gas, nuclear, etc providing baseline capacity.
Also, keep in mind that wind is much, much steadier 200 feet in the air than it is on the ground, where it's subject to all sorts of disruptions and irregularities.
That pretty much means nothing. How close is that guaranteed minimum to the maximum deliverable or expected daily average power?
Probably not, though...
In this part of the world many critical services like hospitals run on back up generators if the main grid goes down. It was part of the main grid that went down
There was surely chaos some places where traffic lights weren’t on backup power, but otherwise the worst things that would happen were maybe you have to close up the office or the worksite for the day. Transit was down but not much else could be done anyway.
It was bittersweet. I’m sure there were problems. I’m also sure that many people who’d never seen a star in their lives saw the sky unfolded like they might never again. It was a stark reminder how much we’ve drowned out with things that “matter”
Mark my words.