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Originally Posted by conradpdx
Investors don't run power plants and there are no individual owners of large power plants, it's all run by investors. They simply buy the power plants that typically are built by the government and sold to them at a loss.
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This is incorrect, at least in the US. (I don't know about other countries.) Investors, such as the stockholders in utility companies, do own the power plants, and put up money for their construction. (Hydro is an exception.) The utility I used to work for (and still have a bit of stock in) build & owns 3 or 4 coal plants, several natural gas units, and a bunch of small hydro. The geothermal plant(s) up the road (Steamboat Geothermal) was built and is owned by investors.
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And part of the reason it's difficult to work with intermittent power suppliers is that it hasn't been an issue in the past. I have been on the DOE site the last few days, and they are actually working on this problem with a system that they say will operate the grid more like the internet...
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Fine, except that problem isn't the big problem. If you go to a system that is all renewable/intermittent, then where do you get the energy to cover for those periods when your renewables are down? If the intermittent is only a small fraction of your total system grid, it's not a problem: you crank up the conventional/nuclear plants a bit, maybe shed a bit of load, and your grid stays up.
But if you don't have enough reserve capacity out there to cover the shortfall, the grid goes down, and you have a lot of angry customers and a lot of work bringing it back up. Building reserve capacity costs money: no one's going to do it unless they expect to get paid. So you either have to have these plants operating at a reasonable fraction of capacity most of the time, in which case you no longer have a 100% renewable grid, or you have to pay them to be on standby, which increases the cost of electricity.