In order for renewables like solar and wind energy to truly take the burden off a grid, we have to have large capacity energy storage solutions that balance the grid over a 8+ hour period. That way we can handle peak demand of the grid during high load which often happens when there's little light and on hot days when the wind doesn't generate nearly as much electricity.
Yes. Batteries are coming. I think many people truly misunderstand the full power with which solar/wind + batteries will transform our societies (and by the way also giving more resilient and insular power networks than centralized power plants can ever give)
Transmission lines can act like storage when there is PV to the east or west of you. This doesn’t remove the need for storage, but can dramatically reduce it.
The old model of cheap peaking power plants and cheaper base-load power is equivalent to cheap peaking power + cheap but inconsistent green energy. It’s a very complicated optimization problem to work out the optimal mix of locations and quantities to of each, but price signals can help assuming you haven’t completely distorted the market.
Chile still wants transmission north south because in the winter solar closer to the equator has longer days and in the winter solar near the poles does.
Oh boy, you are very naive, ain't you? No country will put their energy stability in hands of their neighbors. Or do you see China, Korea, India and Russia interconnect their grids? What other supranational grids you know of?
Note how there are only 7-8 regional connections spanning multiple countries (counting Europe and North America as one block each). One is there for historical reasons (IPS/UPS, Russia), others for economic integration (post-Soviet) or political affinity. With the exception of one, none are integrated with aggressive countries, and in most cases the distance isn’t far enough for it to become reasonable to do what you think can be done. The US ended up with separate interconnections because a single one proved unstable anyway. Hell, Japan has two networks!
DC links do exist outside those blocks, but they’re bilateral and small. The problem isn’t that it’s technically impossible, it’s that states won’t make their grid reliability depend on a neighbor. Just to point a single case, in 2018 a dispute between Kosovo and Serbia was enough to throw off the frequency of the entire continental European grid. Something being technically possible doesn’t make it practical
The nice thing about maps is they show every country, so you can quickly see how few lack such links. If like tables add up what percentage of countries aren’t tied in with at least one of their neighbors. It’s a short list, even NK is tied to China.
You may discount England but it’s got enough DC links to move a large fraction of demand.
Japan has two networks for historic reasons, but they can move well over 2% of each grid’s average demand to the other. It’s just significantly less efficient but that’s relatively minor vs the other disadvantages of a split 50hz vs 60hz national grid.
One thing often missed in these conversations is energy storage is not equal to generation capacity. To get solar to power a full 24 hour cycle, you need 2x the installed capacity compared to a "traditional" generator. One part for the daytime baseload, one part to charge batteries for storage at night. And realistically with seasonal/weather variations, probably far greater than that again.
So saying that solar has caught up with nuclear, well that's great, but it's a long way off where it needs to be, and energy storage is even further off again.
At least in Australia, the solar + battery combo has become realisically genuinely competitive against energy costs from the grid for domestic use. At commercial scale, there is still a long way to go.
This can be done in a distributed way using home batteries. This would increase demand for peak solar production for use outside this peak. At the moment solar production creates a large price disparity that can be corrected with home batteries.
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