A single home isn't a very good proxy for a regional or even national scale grid.

With your house example, the only options are solar and generator. In reality you would have more than these two options. For example, add wind to the mix. You can argue that it's not 100% but it will cover a lot of run time at night, saving you battery capacity and reducing the required over-sizing of your PV system. Perhaps instead of 400% oversizing on PV, you only need 200% PV+Wind oversize.

Now add in something else... biogas perhaps. That covers you a little bit more and you can again reduce your oversizing.

Now add geothermal, hydro, solar-thermal (which works at night), and you start to easily fill in the gaps.

The US had 1,153 billion watts of generating capacity as of 2011 (Nameplate ratings, spreadsheet) and used ~3,797 billion kilowatthours that year. Naively we can say that if all our powerplants ran at 100% nameplate capacity, we could generate an entire year's worth of electrical energy in just about 3300 hours, or about 4 months... giving us a roughly 300% oversize on our electrical generating capacity *now*.

The key, of course, is that none of those plants are operating 24/7/365, and rarely are any of them operating at peak capacity.
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Doesn't make sense: Coal power has actually decreased since 2000 when it was first decided that Germany should ween themselves off of Nuclear power, and the slight increase in coal power in the past two years is only a fraction of retired nuclear capacity, both in total and as a percent of total generation.

Germany's renewable energy push is what's filling that gap. If it wasn't for the nuclear phase-out, they'd probably have lost a third of their coal plants instead.
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"A short distance" often being across national boarders.

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Except that you are. My bad for not scrolling down a bit more:

"My point is that hydro is essentially distributed solar power"

You are adding nothing but smart-ass pedantry to this topic. Fuck off.
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That one project comes nowhere near the total scope of the upgrades planned an in progress. Despite the delays, work is in fact continuing even per your own article.

For a glimpse at the larger picture, consider:

http://energy.gov/oe/downloads...

Google search indeed, Mr. Coward.
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Germany is actually a net exporter - Their total gross production (Bruttoerzeugung insgesamt) for 2013 was 629.0 TWh, while their total consumption (Brutto-Inlandsstromverbrauch) was 596.0 TWh for that same year... resulting in a net import of -33 TWh, aka an export. Of course, these are year averages and they almost certainly import during some times of the year, and when they do most of it comes from France, Denmark, Sweden and Czech Republic.

I also do think it's somewhat unfair to use numbers all the way back to 1990. If we are interested in the impact of renewables, then it would be more appropriate to go back to 2001 at the earliest, when the Renewables Energy Act went into effect. That's when they started getting serious about it.

We can instead consider 1990-2000 as a baseline decade to compare the 2001-2013 decade to, in terms of growth by fuel type.

In the 1990-2000 decade, coal decreased and was supplanted by nuclear and natural gas. In the 2001-2013 numbers, total coal decreases slightly overall but nuclear drops considerably post-Fukushima. Natural gas ramped up to nearly double mid-decade but dropped back down to about 20% higher than it was in 2001. The resulting gaps between these decreased outputs and increased demand is filled entirely by renewables which nearly quadrupled in capacity to become the second largest energy source in the country, just a hair's width (15 TWh) behind soft coal.
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Are you going to be one of those assholes who claims all energy is nuclear energy, because the sun uses nuclear reactions?

If so, please remove yourself from the conversation.
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I don't get that impression at all. He makes a point about being able to predict loads and generation, which strongly suggests that the strategy is to plan well in advance where the power comes from and where it goes to.

Rather, transmission corridors are strategically located to link power plants to the grid. Power plants are built where they have the resources and infrastructure to support them - near waterways, for example, or close to their source of fuel.

Not entirely true. Utilities (who are resellers) prioritize the lowest cost power sources first, and only buy more expensive power if necessary.

Here's a quick example, which I chose because it's germane to the overall topic of renewable integration.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Nope. A good portion of my electricity comes from a coal plant upstate, but there are gas turbine power stations just a few miles from here... they only turn on those turbines for peak shaving, because they cost more per KWh to run. You can tell if they're running or not because you can see the cooling towers steaming up from the highway.

Power comes from the cheapest available source, not the closest. Not all power plants operate equally, or even all the time.
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http://www.ag-energiebilanzen....

It's in German, of course. The key things you're looking for are the second and third rows (Braunkohle and Steinkohle) which are Lignite and Anthracite, respectively. Upport portion of the table is in TWh (Billion KWh) and lower table is percent of total generation by fuel type.
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First, please realize that right now we as a country are in the process of rebuilding the entire power transmission system. That's happening no matter what, and it needs to happen no matter what.

In terms of the HVAC thing, which was just an example but one that seems to have stuck with you disproportionally so whatever... you would need to reduce the duty cycle to reduce power consumption, agreed? You would not have to turn it off for hours at a time - the entire concept here is that you could spread that reduction across a large population so that no single group bears the entire burden. We could, in theory, reduce electrical loads from AC units by 33% by disabling one in three units each for twenty minutes per hour.

As for "getting that power to flow the way he describes" - what is it you're imagining is happening NOW? You have power plants dotted all over the place, each with varying output, and power flows in any particular direction at any time. Nobody is proposing we instantaneously divert megawatts halfway across the country on a moment's notice - such a thing would be entirely unnecessary. However, diverting megawatts - even gigawatts - between substations and across counties and states is something that happens routinely right now, planned and unplanned. Nothing that can't be handled.
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Yes, a boom in coal plant construction... I guess that explains why Germany's coal generating capacity (hard coal + lignite) is down nearly 5% over the past ten years... all those new plants they've been building.

Any new plants they have been building - mostly to replace older, decommissioned ones - have been having problems because the cost of power has dropped significantly since construction began thanks to the glut of wind and solar. All that, despite reducing their nuclear generating capacity by nearly 44 TWh/yr after the Fukushima meltdown.

As for subsidies... have you accounted for the subsidies that current fossil generation gets? Land rights, construction cost subsidies, operational cost subsidies, environmental remediation subsidies... to make an indirect comparison, there's a reason the rest of the world pays three or four times more for their energy than the US does - subsidies.
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Does he? His only claim here is that both supply and demand can be predicted, and that these can be choreographed to optimize utilization. He mentions that current power generation technologies are not available 100% of the time and proposes that the predictable variability of renewable power would be functionally no different. Nowhere does his proposal require loss-less, instantaneous, unlimited transmission of power.

How are, for example, all of the AC units in a particular neighborhood "averaged out"? That makes no sense. There is no communication between these units. It's also not a matter of delaying the start times, it's a matter of remotely disabling them entirely - across entire neighborhoods - to shave peak demands.

So what ARE those costs, versus the cost of business as usual? Just because the article doesn't go into that kind of depth does not mean it hasn't been considered at all.

Largely Irrelevant here; Of course different regions are going to have different characteristics, but you can still model and predict the behaviors of each region and the system as a whole. Other countries manage to do it, and there's no reason the US can't do it as well.

It's also nice to rant about things you don't agree with while not providing any of the expertise you criticize others for claiming.

Unlike, say, Slashdot users who of course are experts in everything...
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Our technologically advanced society will not fall into ruin if nobody ever becomes a 5-time Jeopardy Champion ever gain...

On the other hand, guru-level engineers are considerably more important.
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For traffic lights that are really long, and I'm familiar with, I will often turn my engine off since I know I'm going to be going nowhere for >1min. The timer on the crosswalk sign gives me plenty of warning so I can start the engine and be ready to go.

Of course, this is hardly any different from just looking at the traffic light for the opposing direction - most of the time you can see it change to yellow, then red, and you know a few beats later your way will turn green. Drive the same route for more than a few days (e.g. your typical commute) and nearly anyone will know how the lights behave throughout the day and be able to predict them.
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Even if the hard drive isn't yours, or it hasn't been established that it's yours, if they know you have the password for whatever reason they can compel you to give it up. Failure to do so would at least be obstruction, or perhaps as bad as aiding and abetting.

Provided they also have probable cause to think there's evidence on that device of course.
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