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Comment by crdoconnor | Hacker News Reader

>The bottleneck is the grid. The Grid has to match the production and demand, and at times that is why CA gives away electricity to AZ and pay for AZ for consuming its electricity. In turn, AZ turns off some of its production.

Europe is handling it well: http://www.powermag.com/europe-rebuilds-grid-to-accommodate-...

America will probably lag significantly in this regard because too much of the grid is owned by companies that also own coal/natural gas, etc. and have a strong incentive not to upgrade.

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In Europe one big reason for this is that Germany is now a very large producer of electricity from wind energy and several of Germany's neighbors have old and unstable grid infra. This causes all kinds of problem, especially in the former East German part of Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic.

Those regions still have a large chunk of their power infrastructure dating back to the communist times, power consumption in those regions is up considerably compared to the time when those grids were sized and that combined with the fluctuating supply caused by wind farms has caused some issues that can't be mitigated easily.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-15/how-germa...

>..too much of the grid is owned by companies that also > own coal/natural gas, etc.

Not everywhere. In Texas companies that do transmission are forbidden to own generation and vice versa.

Which causes problems for grid battery storage. Is it generation or transmission?

The incentive not to upgrade is the incredible cost. Why upgrade when the unit economics make no sense? Of course there are some that would suggest the government should make the unit economics work by imposing heavy taxes – that would work except electricity bills would skyrocket due to a de facto price floor.

I would argue that “immediate” action is unnecessary as the economics gradually improve, so will infrastructure. It isn’t like these changes are needed right now. The data doesn’t support the idea of impending catastrophe, unless your business is profiting from such a catastrophe.

The market will solve this. We are already using more renewables when it makes sense and that percentage will organically grow as renewables become more efficient. Eventually oil and coal will be less profitable than renewables and when that happens, the market and infrastructure will naturally evolve.

Innovation rarely happens because the government wills it. The markets drive innovation.

Out of market deals with the government where wind and solar and even hydro generators get prices way above market rates are what is driving the adoption of renewables in Canada.

For the market to create the incentive for renewables the price of power would have had to go up a lot, or the externalities like pollution applied to gas/coal so that the price would go up, but still generation takes so long to plan approve and build and then so long to pay back that markets with varying prices are a bad mechanism. The price would have to be too high for too long than is politically palatable to encourage construction of new generation, and even then why not just build a gas plant.

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