Quote Originally Posted by Grey_Wolf_c View Post
It’s nonsense because we have the solution and therefore doesn’t need to exist for the foreseeable future but will because it’s cheaper in the short term to keep the obsolete system.

GW

If that load balancing happens over hundreds or thousands of miles, losses due to transmission pile up. A quick estimate tells me that the losses for transmitting power from New York to Los Angeles might be between 15% and 35%.

In any case, being able to balance any given local chunk of the grid over a certain size allows better response to disasters and can improve efficiency. I'd certainly feel better if my national power grid had a baseload provided by hydroelectric and nuclear stations, so that no inhabited point of the nation was more than, say 450 km of power line away from one of those types of station.

Also, renewables have different cycles of availability and peak power. Every connected component of every nation has times when there is no sunlight. Sunlight and wind vary with the seasons. Wind power production varies in a complex way with time of day, time of year, and with a chaotic component on top of that.

Large organizations and bureaucracies have to answer to many people. If even in the absence of a disaster, equipment failure, or unusual power draw, you can't guarantee that every person can draw their normal load from the grid at all times, then the system is a failure. Full stop.