Couldn't one argue exactly the opposite? Since, due to physics, electricity is very hard to store and there are already transmission lines, why not use them?
There are going to be factories that probably can't realistically be supported by batteries. Another alternative is to run only in the summer and on sunny days.
Or to do all heavy industry/manufacturing close to hydro, nuclear or geothermal power sources. In a sense, it would be a return towards the old mill brook economy.
They recently opened a big subsea transmission cable between Netherlands and Norway. Norway has mountains for hydro load balancing while Netherlands has wind turbines for volatile production.
In Australia the grid in already encouraging some outlying towns to leave the grid as just maintaining existing grid connections over long distances is more expensive that creating a micro-grid for them.
The factory nearby here (a paper mill) has a larger power plant than the ~35,000 people that live in the area.
They aren't going to switch to something less reliable than the natural gas line feeding the plant, nor are they going to switch to something more expensive.
It typically only shuts down for several weeks a year and isn't all that profitable (at least, the owners keep going bankrupt, 4 or 5 times in the recent 20 years), I doubt running less would help.
Paper has become a worse and worse business since electronic media has taken over gradually.
But the "turn factories off" was a bit of a joke. Though Nordpool does have its spikes and it indeed makes sense to sometimes turn off factories. Depends on your process.
Nowadays they run data centers in some old paper factories here (since the electricity is cheap).
So in a sense the old industries are gone, from lack of demand, and new industries have gone where there is cheap power available.
The thought was that industry doesn't necessarily care about the grid, it just treats it as an option and calculates whether it is a good one.
(hence pointing out that it was the largest energy consumer in the area and had already opted out of buying grid power, that it's not in a great industry strengthens the point)
> Since, due to physics, electricity is very hard to store and there are already transmission lines,
You're going to have to actually argue "due to physics" on this one, it's far more like "due to technology and engineering.
Transmission lines are hugely expensive, involve stringing valuable materials for miles. The cost is going to vary widely throughout the grid, but the EIA estimates an average of ~$0.04/kWh across the entire US [1].
Most storage costs are somewhat easier to estimate, as batteries costs are well known. Current prices on new lithium ion batteries put the cost at ~$0.15-$0.20/kWh. This is probably not the most cost effective storage model, vanadium redox flow batteries, or hydro storage, or used car lithium ion batteries will drive this down substantially. Also, storage costs are dropping dramatically, while transmission costs are unlikely to change much.
For many locations, it may make far more sense to pay $0.20/kWh than to build out the grid to that location. And this is definitely true for many locations, even in California, that are only a few miles away from grid-connected homes. It's all a matter of the costs of current technology, discount rates for the cost of up-front capital investments, and the expected tech curve.
Long-distance transmission does have the potential to hugely improve the cost-effectiveness of intermittent renewables. A recent study tried to optimize costs using high-voltage DC interties between US grids to distribute renewable energy across the country, and found that storage was not necessary, even when transitioning a huge percentage of the power source to renewables. [2]
>There are going to be factories that probably can't realistically be supported by batteries
This again is all a matter of cost. I do think that transmission can help a ton here. But I think there's going to be both time shifting (storage) and distance shifting (transmission) in the future.
I think that people underestimate the rate at which storage will get cheap, just as they did with wind and solar, but that's just my humble opinion.
There are going to be factories that probably can't realistically be supported by batteries. Another alternative is to run only in the summer and on sunny days. Or to do all heavy industry/manufacturing close to hydro, nuclear or geothermal power sources. In a sense, it would be a return towards the old mill brook economy.
They recently opened a big subsea transmission cable between Netherlands and Norway. Norway has mountains for hydro load balancing while Netherlands has wind turbines for volatile production.