https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/resources/record-year-rene...
South Australia is also incredibly sunny and has the advantage of being an arid desert. Again, that does not scale well.
South Australia sits at 25 to 37 degrees south. The longest HVDC line (in China) is 3300 km, that is 30 degrees.
Based on existing HVDC lines and South Australian circumstances we can say that we should reliably be able to supply somewhere up to 55 to 67 degrees from the equator, in general. Do you know what is at 66 degrees north? The arctic circle. That is how far north we end up.
This is not even considering that closer to the poles the wind resources are much better, especially in winter time.
The 4 million people living north of the Arctic circle might have a harder time. But it would seem that it is a trivially easy to solve edge case when the rest of the world has a solution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_Circle#Human_habitation
This of course discounts any geopolitical concerns, which makes it harder. But on a US or EU continental scale we easily have the technology today.
South Australia is 25 to 37 degrees south. The longest HVDC line (in China) is 3300 km, that is 30 degrees.
So now based on existing HVDC lines and South Australian circumstances we can say that we should reliably be able to supply somewhere up to 55 to 67 degrees from the equator, in general. Do you know what is at 66 degrees north? The arctic circle. That is how far north we end up.
This is not even considering that closer to the poles have much better wind resources, especially in winter time.
So, the 4 million people living north of the Arctic circle might have a harder time. But it would seem that it is a trivially easy to solve edge case when the rest of the world has a solution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_Circle#Human_habitation
This of course discounts any geopolitical concerns, which makes it harder. But on a US or EU continental we easily have the technology today.
Is it? This adds nothing to the discussion. If it were actually 50% and i claimed 30%, that would be a distinction worth pointing out.
Since we are being pedantic, you should really look up the figures for energy share from wind in 2021 in Ireland. It fell to 29% which completely negates your claim of it growing rapidly.
I am framing it as carbon vs no carbon. A new nuclear plant's timeline to carbon-neutrality compared to the counterfactual where an equal capital investment is made in solar/wind is well over a decade. Given the time crunch we are on to lower emissions, I simply do not think we have the time to waste building new plants. That said, we should not be decommissioning plants that are still operable.
Texas has been building wind and solar like crazy since then, such electricity in Texas in 2021 was 24% wind + 4% solar [2].
Texas is building 6.1 GW of solar in 2022 and 3.8 GW of wind [3]. So that indeterminate point in the future where ERCOT is more than 30% wind+solar is probably 2023 or 2024. It might even be 2022.
[1] https://comptroller.texas.gov/economy/fiscal-notes/2020/augu... [2] https://www.ercot.com/gridinfo/generation [3] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50818
Meanwhile, France enjoys a low carbon grid together with low energy prices as do many parts of Canada, parts of eastern europe and so on.
It is wrong to frame the argument as wind/solar versus everything else. The argument should be carbon versus no carbon. Period.