GDP has to grow so the market grows so the ownership class keeps getting richer.

This then becomes a general message of "GDP will always grow" because if people believe it might not, or won't, it doens't.

I don't know what that unmaintained life is so I didn't address it. I'm sure somewhere they've decommissioned wind/solar/green installs and run some units into the ground to find out, but I haven't investigated to see if there's any published white papers on it.

As far as I know, Grid-scale li-ion (or lipo more likely) installs are super rare. A quick google says in 2021-2022 there was only 16gW of grid scale li-ion/lipo storage. Our peak usage is on the order of terawatts.

What I said was:

> The main issue here is that even states where Solar and Wind dominate during the day

... which is specifically states like California in the US, not Global. I can't speak to the global grid because I have no knowledge. In CA 60-80% of daytime energy production can be Solar, so it dominates the grid behavior.

That's correct, since OPs question was just if the power companies abandoned their post, not if 99% of all people died or whatever.

If they've fully automated control, it could. But I doubt they have. Grid loading is actually pretty noisy... things like overall weather, temperature, wind gusts, even clouds passing over Solar farms, or large industrial consumers which could be taking in 1-2% of your load... the energy generation operators have to work to match that load as it gains and sheds and typically keep a little (but not too much, because it costs money) extra power generation above what is current needed to respond to micro-spikes, in addition to ramping and up and down with the day.

For example, on your average summer day if it's 30C out, you're going to need a lot more power than on a nice fall day where it's maybe 17C out and nobody is running air conditioning or heating. For a computer to predict that load and match it consistently to the generated power isn't easy.

Maybe they're doing it? But I think it's much, much more common for there to be a control room. There's further aspects to this, because we're glossing over how power grids actually work - there's a bidding process for energy that happens and the energy generators (wind, solar, power plants, hydro, whatever) will ramp up or down their energy contributions to the grid both based on load demand but also on energy pricing. Maybe in BC your utility is not for profit and that's not part of it, but in the US it certainly is a big deal.

In the end, it would run longer even if fully automated, but things like hydro plants are insanely complex. Without regular maintenance and inspection they're not likely to outlast a Wind or Solar farm.

Funny enough, small scale hydro (<10kW) with battery intermediates can be insanely reliable and maintenance free. I've seen reports of off-grid installs basically running for years with no maintenance other than clearing off leaves from the intake every 6mo or so.

... I did say until they break down? Either software failure, generator failure, bearing failures, blade failures, whatever it is. They will have an average unmaintained life expectancy probably on the scale of months.

I'm talking about Grid scale Solar and residential Net Solar, not residential or commercial Solar + Li-ion. If you're off-grid with your Solar + Li-ion you don't factor into grid loading anyway, unless you have high energy processes, like an industrial facility which uses Solar + Li-ion for office power and grid for like arc furnaces or something really energy hungry.

Solar does drop off hard in the evenings, and it's a big problem they call "The Duck Curve". Go ahead and check out some of the online papers about it.

There's always going to be some residual power generation. If there's a small town-scale Grid which is powered exclusively by hydro, there's a good chance it could run for a decently long time, but they need some way to offset a relatively constant energy production into the peak hours.

Hydro has some of the same problems above - it doesn't respond to load demand, and if it's on a hybrid Grid, it'll have the same Solar problem.

It's actually a big problem in our energy industry right now: The Duck Curve. https://www.cnet.com/home/energy-and-utilities/the-duck-curve-the-cute-sounding-energy-problem-well-need-to-fix/

We've deployed so much Solar that the Peak energy generation needed (outside solar) is about 2x the minimum (which happens during midday when the sun is highest). That's a huge swing in non-Solar energy demand.

Even without the Duck Curve problem, your night time demand is going to be about 30% less than your day time demand.

So if your Hydro is scaled to handle Peak demand, you would have to shed all that night time power somewhere, or have an Operator close the sluices which feed the generator turbines a bit, to scale back the energy.

If your Hydro is scaled to handle Off-peak/Night demand, you would end up with Brownouts and possibly Blackouts during the day as Grid demand far out-strips generation and you end up back like Texas in 2021.

Edit: Basically the first person to solve and patent an efficient and inexpensive way at Grid scale to store excess Solar from the day to use at night is going to become the richest person in the world ever.

Solar and Wind will continue to operate until they break down... but the Grid which distributes it relies heavily on human input to route around issues and balance the supply to demand, even with lots of automation around it.

The main issue here is that even states where Solar and Wind dominate during the day, our power mostly is coming from coal and natural gas at night. And those big plants need human operators.

Without those operators, what you'd see is power issues during the day, since Solar and Wind can overwhelm the Grid without dumping excess peak power, or momentarily dip causing instability. As Solar falls off in the evening, brownouts would occur as Wind would be insufficient to supply the entire Grid, and the fossil-fuel plants would not ramp up to match evening demand without human operators, so they only supply a trickle of idle power generation.

Brownouts would progress rapidly to full blackouts within a day or even hours as Grid demand far outstrips the supply, which will cause irregular loading on the remaining availability, tripping fail-safes/grid breakers/etc., and causing the Grid to shut itself down, which can't be restarted easily.

A real life example of partial abandonment is visible in the 2021 Texas power grid failure. Operators weren't able to get into work due to conditions. Supply lines and trains and trucks carrying fossil fuels were disrupted and delayed. Grid instability due to unmatched demand caused the whole thing to fall over (they shut it down before total failure which would require a very slow "black start"). It took about 2 days for this to all unfold as back to back storms hit the state, and well over a week for most of the capacity to be restored.

There are some automatic green-power storage systems which would allow small subsets of the Grid to continue to operate, like large scale batteries, or pumped storage using water and gravity to capture excess Solar. But without Grid operators to selectively shut down sections, the demand would rapidly outstrip those kind of storage systems and we'd see similar end results, maybe lasting a few days more, but hard to guess without examining particular cases.