
No, country X did NOT just run entirely on wind - corradio
https://medium.com/@oliviercorradi/no-country-x-did-not-just-run-entirely-on-wind-bcca72c3e69b
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freerobby
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookkeeping](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookkeeping)

This is the equivalent of saying the $999 you saved for your Macbook didn't
actually buy you that Macbook, because once your money entered the bank, it
became indistinguishable and inseparable from all the other money in the bank,
and who knows which pennies went where.

Well, that's true, and if you insist that _your_ $999 bought _your_ Macbook,
you can take precautions to ensure that (at enormous temporal sacrifice). As a
practical matter, this doesn't matter to anybody, so we come together as a
society and agree that transactions don't need a perfectly isolated series of
exchanges, so long as the credits and debits match up.

The same is true for energy.

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corradio
Quite interesting remark. However, I'm not saying the savings from producing
more wind are not real. They are very real, because you avoided using other
means of production, potentially fossil fuels. So that's good.

On the other hand, saying that you basically got your Macbook for free (saved
all the money, i.e. ran exclusively on wind) can only work if you didn't spend
anything else. Saving 999$ but spending 200 more (i.e. also having coal) and
not counting it because you somehow earned more money somewhere else (i.e.
exported it) is not what I call proper bookkeeping.

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ricardobeat
No "for free" in the analogy. You had $999 from wind work, $200 from coal
work. You can totally say you bought that laptop on wind only.

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corradio
and that's exactly the point: we should focus on whether or not you got any
money from coal, regardless of what you did with it, because that's what is
driving emissions in the end.

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ricardobeat
It is not possible to completely replace one with the other without a
transition period, and until we solve the storage issue.

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heaviside
The fossil plants are either needed for reliability purposes, i.e. spinning
reserve, voltage support, or they are online because it is more economical for
them to stay online. It is often better for the plants to stay online at
minimum generation than shut down and endure a restart time of several hours.

