this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2024
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Supplying energy isn't only doing what's "cost effective." It's about meeting demand.
This is why when suppliers have difficulty meeting demand, prices go up.
If we only did what was the cheapest instead of what was required to meet demand, then our demands wouldn't be met and we would be without energy during those times.
Check the second link again. They were calculating how demand was met over time.
In Australia a mostly open, sparsely populated, continent sized island with vast amounts of sun wind and hydro, with people mostly gathered in a small band of the coast on one side (and still even then needed 1/3 of total generating capacity backed by fossil fuels).
It's great that oz can maybe get away with almost entirely renewable (maybe, that simulation is essentially just multiplying current generation by a large number, adding some storage and saying that mostly takes generation above demand, it doesn't do any sort of analysis of when where or how that energy is generated or makes its way to the sources of demand), but it's not a model for the rest of the world.