[beembeem]

Firm refers to the generation profile of the power source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispatchable_generation

Batteries are not cost or resource efficient for winter where I live. Less than 8 hours of sunlight is not enough to heat a house during the day let alone night. There simply isn't enough solar generation even when overprovisioned to last.

[coryrc]

Drake Landing shows how you can shift heating from summer to winter. For twenty years it's been heating homes in Alberta, Canada. Though I see now, because it's a one-off, they are having trouble getting replacement parts :(.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/okotoks-drake-landing...

[BobaFloutist]

How often/much do you realistically need to heat a house with high, quality, modern insulation? Does your house have triple-paned windows, a vestibule for each entryway, well insulated walls, attic, and roof, etc?

Also if we're talking about heating, there's also the possibility of geothermal heat pumps, which seem to work everywhere, and while they have a high one-time capital cost but I'm pretty sure can more or less keep trucking along providing unbelievably cheap heat pretty much forever - even if you have to replace components, you probably won't ever have to redig the shaft again, which is a huge factor in the cost.

[beembeem]

> a house with high, quality, modern insulation?

How much is society willing to spend collectively to upgrade our housing stock for this? Not to mention triple-paned windows are not standard by any sufficiently large builder on new construction. Double-paned? Certainly.

Geothermal is great. But in an already built city, it's not feasible to install quickly. There is also a lack of legal framework or precedent in place to heat multiple properties from a single source. I tried very hard to obtain a quote for this and it was well over 50k for a single family home, and nobody would actually do it because of the big city I live in. Want a heat pump too? That's another 25k. Throwing down 100k up-front is not a reasonable request to a typical homeowner.

[jahnu]

HVDC can go a couple of thousand km no problem with relativity low losses.

[tuna74]

Yes, solar power won't work in Svalbard winters. This is known.

[beembeem]

I'm not talking about the arctic circle. This applies to Northern US, Sourthern Canada. And for that matter, a good chunk of the EU.

[adgjlsfhk1]

well I'm sure those 2530 people can find another power source.

[cycomanic]

But nuclear is not dispatchable either so what's your point? It's funny how everyone brings up the intermittance of solar and wind as a point how they can never work because they don't provide baseload and nuclear is the solution.

If you read opinions from operators and incident reports you'll find that large power plants like nuclear are actually a much bigger problem for network management, because if you have to take down a nuclear plant for some reason, you suddenly have a huge issue providing that electricity with fast dispatchable generation.

[beembeem]

It's a fair point that nuclear (and all power plants) need maintenance windows where they come offline (and occasionally unplanned outages). But this is not the same as saying nuclear is not dispatchable, that's just incorrect.