And batteries:

China launches world’s first grid-forming sodium-ion battery storage plant - https://www.ess-news.com/2025/06/03/china-launches-worlds-fi... - June 3rd, 2025 ("With a total investment of over CNY 460 million [$63.8 million] and occupying 34k square metres, the Baochi plant is designed for an installed capacity of 200MW/400MWh. Based on a dual daily charge-discharge cycle, it can regulate up to 580 GWh annually — enough to power 270,000 households, with 98 per cent of its energy sourced from renewables. The facility supports more than 30 local wind and solar power stations, alleviating the impact of intermittent supply and facilitating the integration of high shares of renewables into the grid.")

China Already Makes as Many Batteries as the Entire World Wants - https://about.bnef.com/blog/china-already-makes-as-many-batt... - April 19th, 2024

Well, then you need some diversity strategy such that you aren’t just building more stuff that also goes offline. And you would need it to be able to flex up in a controlled fashion to make up for losses in other geographies. That’s hard with wind and solar. They don’t flex very well. When things are going well, you get what you get. There’s no way to make the wind blow harder or make the sun shine more brightly when you want it. You need well controlled base load capacity. Of nuclear, gas, and coal, nuclear is clean and basically renewable for all intents and purposes (it’s not, but it might as well be).

Note though that this is largely because Texas uses a crazy amount of energy compared to California. Some due to local climate, some due to lack of efficiency regs, and a lot due to lack of rooftop solar (going back to their weather again). California's record for grid demand served by batteries is 4x the record of Texas. California's renewables-to-load ratio is double Texas's. Again this is significantly due to California having over 5x the rooftop solar of Texas, which lowers grid demand in the daytime.

> just interconnect

Or instead, the federal regulations should obviously be fixed.

Yes, it definitely drops, but we’ve had issues where wind was basically offline in west Texas. So, you still need to balance it out.

A lot of newer construction and especially apartment buildings will end up using resistive heating, the least efficient option.

Sadly, getting an HVAC person willing to install a heat pump system in Texas seems to be quite a challenge.

Some of the highest peak energy usages the state has ever seen have been in the winter. For instance, that 2021 winter storm absolutely crushed the records of energy usage in the state before it all crashed, and every year after that has seen even higher amounts of usage in the winter since.

ERCOT was also load shedding major circuits that fed fossil gas compressor stations (which fed downstream fossil gas generation), leading to a generation death spiral.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41787696 (previous comment I wrote with citations)

Well, it depends on the geography. I’d have to look at output for west Texas and the panhandle. But yea, wind doesn’t necessarily go down. But solar does if for no other reason than angle of incidence in the winter.

You don’t have nuclear totally offline except when refueling (and MSRs might solve even that). Nuclear can dial up down relatively easily. , however. Simplistically, you just pull/push the rods out/in (yea, there’s more to it than that, and it doesn’t react instantly, but roughly speaking, that’s it).