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Europe is locking itself in to US LNG

(davekeating.substack.com)
151 points hunglee2 | 1 comments | 16 Sep 25 13:56 UTC | HN request time: 0.226s | source
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probablypower ◴[16 Sep 25 14:53 UTC] No.45263135[source]▶
There are a lot of posts here pushing batteries.

Batteries are an expensive solution that doesn't scale well at the grid level. It is useful for grid stability (fast frequency response) but simply a non-starter when you're dealing with national grids.

Batteries are an added cost to the system, without producing more electricity, and as a result prices will go up.

A far cheaper source of flexibility is Demand Side Response. Particularly data centres that are willing to be market actors. Compute can happen anywhere, so it should happen where the wind blows and the sun shines. It is cheaper to transmit bits than Megawatts.

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1. nradov ◴[16 Sep 25 16:09 UTC] No.45264160[source]▶
Demand side response drives up costs a lot. You end up with expensive, rapidly depreciating capital equipment sitting idle and not earning any revenue. The same problem applies whether the equipment is a GPU cluster or aluminum smelter. If we're going to have a modern industrial economy then we need to have enormous quantities of cheap electrical power available 24 hours a day.

Long distance high voltage transmission lines can help to an extent but create the same sort of concerns about dependence on unreliable foreign countries as fossil fuel imports.