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It's a scam because you don't have magic energy storage.
Sufficient Battery storage - and you can verify this yourself - would require metropolitan area sized battery arrays. (I did some basic calcs for flow batteries)
So you either have to be content for closing down the country for a few random weeks in a year, or maintain an entire parallel mostly idle power system to pick up the slack.
That's what the Germans did. That's why after spending enough to fully decarbonize their grid via nuclear, they have the world's highest energy price and carbon intensity way worse than France.
Václav Smil explains it better here.
The US is the size of continental Europe and also has Canada and Mexico grid connections. If you put enough density of turbines and solar panels - chances that there won't be enough trough all of the areas are quite slim. By the time that there is peak in NY the sun is still shining in California. 6 months of the year you have very long days in northern Canada.
It is doable. Half of the year with the surpluses we could split corundum into al and oxidize, in the winter burn it as thermite.
It’s viable if those panels and turbines are produced in Chinese coal powered factories and the US forever prices itself out of any competitive industrial production. It’s pretty damning that the production of renewable electricity generating devices never seems to use renewable energy itself.
Also after many times multiplying your electricity costs, you will still have to deal with blackouts regularly. Which means home generators for the rich and just “dealing with it” for the poor in practice.
California has outlawed home generators, which means New York will be next, and then the country. So it's darkness for everyone.
Yes, the blue states will be crushed by their contradictions any day now, just as the dialectic predicts.
No, the victims of blue state policies will be crushed, and the perpetrators will profit.
Nybbler is wrong: California has outlawed portable generators, but exempted the $40,000+ full-mansion backup generators like the Obamas have at their estates.
What's the profit in banning generators again?
Lots. Employing regulators and enforcers from your party, using the law to prevent competition from better products, exploiting the pain your policies caused to generate demand for relief and subsidies... Which your party will control and profit from.
That all of this is negative sum wrecking and looting doesn't stop it being extremely profitable for the perpetrators.
Competition? What competition? We're talking about two separate markets here. People with portable generators are never going to buy $40k units.
Same goes for subsidies. To be clear, you are claiming California will subsidize $40k gas generators?
And the perpetrators of this elimination of competition and collapse of sales are... Generator companies? The ones that profit from selling people generators? The ones that will sell almost no generators in California?
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