Quote:
Originally Posted by Biggd
We can send people to the Moon and space ships to Mars, I'm sure we could figure it out and adapt!
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It is not the adaptation, it is the politics.
My understanding is the the grid can take 5-6% of intermittent production and remain stable. (I am not a great authority on that - just my understanding)
The two major sources we think of in that category is solar and wind.
Unfortunately, large projects with either of these two tend to reshape a neighborhood... and can get push back.
Smaller (though a loose term) rooftop solar projects don't seem to have that politicized negativity around them. They could reach that percentage threshold without improvements to the grid... but are most easily achieved with a steady flow of credits and public service advertisements. We just have not done that great with this in NH.
The rest of the supply would be a steady baseload that could be geared up when necessary and down when demand ebbs. That supply has cheaper formats like Natural Gas, and more expensive formats like biomass. To make the more expensive formats work, the government had to place in carve outs and a credit/tax type system under our Renewable Portfolio Standard statue.
In either case, because it involve some sort of credit/tax system... politicians both want to limit the impact and divide up based on the various interests they represent.
And that is just the production side of electricity... it doesn't even touch the usage side.