Nuclear Fusion

[Grey_Wolf_c]

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.

I find it hard to accept an argument predicated on "but it would be so inefficient" over a 15% loss when in the next breadth the alternative suggested is nuclear power, whose losses due to inefficiency are somewhere between 65% and 73% depending on the model.

Also, as has been pointed out, such losses would only happen occasionally, rather than constantly.

Also, renewables have different cycles of availability and peak power.

Yes, and they happen to coincide pretty well with our own cycles of peak power, solar especially. Not to mention we can store energy, in various ways (not just chemically), and we are poised to improve that area of technology enormously in the next few years.

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.

Indeed, which is why I don't feel that centralizing energy generation is a good idea. A distributed system is far more flexible and far more reliable than a single point of failure. Even if it occasionally would require long-distance transfer at a bit of inefficiency.

Middle of the night? most people are in bed by 24.00, from then on power demand drops away dramatically, except for things like refridgerators.

Heck, even those consume less power once the humans stop opening it to grab stuff from inside.

Grey Wolf