>>12659940You'd want *some* degree of grid upgrades, definitely. But the paper's idea here is that solar, in particular, is going to get so cheap that you can install it everywhere and get *some* power out of it, even on cloudy winter days, shift demand with electric vehicle charging & electric water heaters to blunt peak demand, make up any remaining shortfall with gas turbines, and then offset the carbon with atmospheric capture during the sunny parts of the year when there's power to spare (possibly even producing hydrocarbon fuels in the process). A fractured grid isn't the end of the world!
>>12659944Yeah, you're totally right about gas & oil plants making more sense than battery or compressed air or flywheels or ... energy storage on an enormous scale (i.e., smoothing over weeks and months rather than days and hours) - that's the paper's conclusion, too! They just take it a step further and model that plus carbon capture in the good times, and find it's 100% viable for a zero-carbon grid.
You're also right that wind and solar are, comparatively, pretty land-thirsty. If land use is a major constraint, nuclear definitely re-enters the picture, and in a really big way. I'd be happy to leave this up to the market to decide the relative value of a field of wheat vs a field of solar panels, personally, but the Iowa corn farmers will demand their business model gets state protection - and they might even get it.
