>Base load power and intermittent (e.g. solar/wind) power are not the same thing, and are not comparable.
>Barring some energy storage miracle, we'll eventually end up with ~35% renewables, 15% hydro, 50% natural gas in the US, with HVDC interconnect. No nuclear, no coal.
Does this scenario look any more promising with a massive government project to build HVDC? That reduces the intermittent aspect of solar/wind (weather comes in band and sun and wind are somewhat anti-correlated, more true over larger distance). Could we push that renewable percentage up higher and use gas more for peaking?
Without HVDC, renewables will probably peak lower (15%) than the 35% I mentioned.
HVDC and UHVDC is getting fairly cost effective now, so I don't think we'll need huge government subsidies to see adoption there, and it can be driven by utilities.
You can amortized wind really well with interconnect (unlike solar, which is strictly diurnal), so we'll see a trend back to wind in the renewable space.
However, I don't think we'll get beyond 50% renewable/hydro. Wind is built in areas where it is cost effective, which are the areas already taken. As you get HVDC, that area expands slightly, but I don't see us getting to 300GW of average wind capacity.
>HVDC and UHVDC is getting fairly cost effective now, so I don't think we'll need huge government subsidies to see adoption there, and it can be driven by utilities.
I've been told by people trying to build these things that there are some pretty terrible incentives discouraging HVDC.
States without access to good wind sites may still oppose HVDC because they would prefer to build either different power sources or less efficient windmills in their own state to capture the tax revenue (or to use federal subsidies that might go unused), so they prefer not to be able to buy power form a farther away state.
And even the reverse can be true. Localities with extremely cheap energy prices can sometimes oppose a HVDC market expansion because if local sources were able to sell to more consumers it would raise their local prices (the market changed over time or was estimated incorrectly, etc).
>Barring some energy storage miracle, we'll eventually end up with ~35% renewables, 15% hydro, 50% natural gas in the US, with HVDC interconnect. No nuclear, no coal.
Does this scenario look any more promising with a massive government project to build HVDC? That reduces the intermittent aspect of solar/wind (weather comes in band and sun and wind are somewhat anti-correlated, more true over larger distance). Could we push that renewable percentage up higher and use gas more for peaking?