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Comment by neltnerb | Hacker News Reader

Is this not just the same question as for decades?

Which is cheaper, a peaker plant after the transmission line hitting peak capacity, or increased transmission line capacity for a small percentage of the time?

Now it's just battery storage instead of natural gas peaker plants. You can still smooth out the transmission line capacity with downstream storage.

Or have we already done that to the max with peaker plants and now transmission lines are running at their capacity 90% of the time? I haven't read the numbers in a while, it used to be really bad!

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Here is the thing: planning a grid is always done with cost in mind, we do not build golden pylons for the sake of it.

But on the other hand, reasonable grid planning is done a decade ahead, more for some equipment. Money spent in a hurry is likely to be wasted in that business.

Storage to optimize grid (not production) cost is neither efficient nor resilient as far as I know.

Also having a peaker plant solves production peaks, not transmission limits. And nobody builds a second peaker at the other end of a line to save on grid costs. Redispatching is a thing, but it is a small optimization, not a solution to an underdeveloped grid.

Yeah, although distributed power generation is an actual solution to reduce transmission loads, I agree that it's too soon. It is very complicated (but I think doable!), but even then probably takes too much space for populated areas.

I like the idea of knowing if a transmission line is hot enough to start a fire, but that isn't a substitute for new transmission capacity from remote PV farms or just to be more resilient.

It’s not the complexity of distributed generation that prevents it from being widespread but the cost vs. cost savings

... things can have multiple reasons?

Space, cost, reliability, of course it's complex to integrate new generators that require communications to work together properly alongside planning the real wire infrastructure.

I believe it can be done, sure, but it's still complex and utility companies are not a fan of complexity.

But imagine how much better audio quality we would have if we had gold electrical lines to our houses.

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