While wind is more expensive than solar, and has issues highlighted in article, the higher capacity factors, and production outside of midday, means less battery capacity is needed to serve renewables, and batteries get charged more often.

A key to bringing down transmission costs for wind, especially offshore where transmission is the highest cost component, is hydrogen production. Picking up H2, or refueling, by trucks and ships can provide cheaper energy than transmission lines. Pipelines are even cheaper with enough volume, and double as storage.

  • humanspiral@lemmy.caOP
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    2 hours ago

    Spoolable FRP pipes up to 4" in diameter can fit on a truck. Rated for 200bar. Pre covid, this was quoted as $50k/km as full deployment cost with 10s of km per day buildout rate. Spoolable pipe that can fit on ships has no diameter limit.

    I don’t know details of manufacturing process, but spools, plastic pipe extrusion, and fiber reinforcement should be highly automatable.