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A comment on Wind and solar are cheaper than thought, admits UK government. Parent comment

Re:Wind and solar are cheaper than thought, admits UK govern... by BelleOfTheBall on Thursday August 27, 2020 @03:48PM (#24297839)
How viable would that be in terms of maintenance? I presume it'd have to have a lot of failsafes or personnel that's assigned to some of the distant or at-risk grid sections, to keep things running smoothly and do repairs fast if something gets damaged.
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Re:Wind and solar are cheaper than thought, admits UK govern... by elihu on Thursday August 27, 2020 @06:12PM (#24299265)
That gets at an interesting point that if one country depends on energy from a far distant country for part of the day, then the defense of those power lines has immense geopolitical significance; similar to oil and gas pipelines.

Maybe the solution is to keep a lot of dirty petroleum or coal-based generation capacity around to use in an emergency or war, but don't actually use it.

As usual, there's a trade-off between efficiency and resilience.

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