For a given situation of physical geography and available technology, any nation is going to have one or a small set of optimal technologies for producing electricity.

Start with onshore wind in the US. We have abundant, high CF onshore wind resources in the Northern and Southern Great Plains.

All we really need to do back in the US is to fix the institutional limitations in which transmission is built according to state-level needs, and establish a system in which transmission can be established according to regional and national needs.

We can get to 20% electricity from wind alone by adding adequate transmission. However, the thing about the harvest of variable renewable energy is that its available when its available. So the average abundance of wind relative to load changes the net load of the US, and in particular makes solar PV more valuable, since a larger share of low wind generation hours tends to occur during daylight hours.

So add solar to wind, and we get an increase in the fit between the generation and the load, and a smaller swing between maximum yield and average yield, both of which allow for more penetration.

There is also an increase in value of wind that is not closely correlated with Great Plains winds, and since weather systems tend to move west to east, that means that an increase in Great Plains winds increases the value of wind resources laying to their east and west.

With onshore wind+solar, there is also an increase in the value of offshore wind.

This elaboration of an energy harvest ecology is a natural consequence of the economics of living off of renewable energy harvests, rather than plundering stockpiles of sequestered carbon that seemed to be available "for free", but turns out to be available for a quite high price indeed ... the cost of the collapse of an industrial civilization addicted to its exploitation if cannot learn how to kick the habit.


I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.