Casey Handmer
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
There's also a bunch of generators on the grid that are notionally turned down and they're like operators, say 40, 50 percent capacity factor.
But they max out at about 80 percent capacity factor because you got to bring them down for maintenance pretty often, especially if they're old.
And so they're saying, well, we could pay you just to operate this old coal plant or something at high capacity.
It'll go down this power line to this place where the smelter used to be.
We'll set up there.
And then we promise to curtail when you need the power, which basically means they just have a massive captive battery plant as well, which is fine.
You just buy that and it arrives on a truck.
The major advantage of doing that over the pure solar play is that the power is already there.
So there's no risk there.
And then you don't need a massive amount of land.
The problem with the solar approach is that there's no two ways about it.
It's a farming operation.
You need a huge amount of land.
The total amount of land that you're using, less than 1% is under batteries, under roads, under data center structures, et cetera, et cetera.
It's mostly solar.
It's kind of a nightmare.
I mean, like...
There's this very popular misconception that like there's not enough land to do solar.
Right.
Right.