Re:US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved
by liketochill on Wednesday December 14, 2022 @06:02AM
(#33982051)
Do you have week long blackouts currently? In any given year you can count on a week where a panel only produces 10%. It just has to be cloudy or rainy. However much solar we add, even with storage to get through a night, needs some other source to get through the cloudy week, unless we are ok with blackouts.
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Re:US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved
by Tade0 on Wednesday December 14, 2022 @08:39AM
(#33983277)
A panel. Panels spread over hundreds of thousands of square kilometres produce power averaged over that area, so they're much more consistent and predictable.
HVDC lines help with this a lot. It has gotten to a point where there are serious plans to build a long, undersea HVDC line from the UK to Morocco which, get this, is poised to cost less than the equivalent(GWh delivered annually) Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant:
https://xlinks.co/morocco-uk-power-project/
That's how cheap the combination of solar and HVDC is.
Re:US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved
by liketochill on Wednesday December 14, 2022 @11:38AM
(#33985992)
Glad it will work there. There has been local opposition to new transmission lines in the USA (see Maine recently) so when folks say “just build powerlines” all I can think of is the difficulty of the land assembly and permitting. Technically it is easy, it is all the humans in the way that make it hard.