Oh, even better, you're always going to have enough propeller power to take off. Extremely high power-density batteries on a glider which detaches at cruising altitude and flies back to the airport? Oh, you fly even higher than normal before detaching to transfer even more energy into PE?

Hmm, shouldn't electric be able to fly even higher? But they're short range, so probably not worth it ... yet.

Finally, I think you might be still high on the power cost. $.10/kwh is retail cost in the PNW, they might be, um, bullshitting a little and have purchased power at a very good rate at a particular time just so they could say $5. They didn't say every flight would be $5. So energy could have been 3x more than you estimated.

Maybe today I'd do micropython on ESP32. Download text file from device, edit, upload back on.

https://truecostblog.com/2009/06/02/the-hidden-trucking-indu...

Positive ROI becomes present if Texas has large amounts of nondispatchable power and the neighboring areas do not have the same. So if Texas builds more wind and solar than they can consume themselves, then it makes sense to invest in more interconnection capacity. But that's predicted on excessive production first.

Finally, let's just say they built 70 GW of interconnection, because you seen to think that number is important. Do you think Louisiana and Arkansas have that much generation and transmission capacity themselves? Let alone EXCESS?

Washington and Oregon are on the same grid, with about peak generation of 31 GW and 18 GW, yet only about 7 GW of transfer capacity exists, and it's only that high because of sales to California because of seasonal hydroelectric oversupply, an oversupply which doesn't exist in Texas, Arkansas, or Louisiana.

Significantly higher interconnection capacity does not yet make financial sense. They're right to not yet waste money on them.

The real problem is boomers have stopped allowing things to be built efficiently, so supply is limited, had been limited for decades, and demand still grows, so prices spike disproportionally with demand increases.

Additionally we subsidize wind and solar heavily, but the fixed costs of large plants don't drop, so we end up spending for our power twice and for natural gas plants to replace coal, because that's the only solution we will do to keep power during the winter in Northern states.

Enron fiasco put a local power company here in WA in insurmountable debt because they couldn't ship power to California because the lines were already overloaded. If you build a major new power-consuming plant in Washington, you'll need to get power from someplace closer than half the width of Texas (and only even that far because historically we had coal power plants in Montana, so there's existing long-distance transmission).

I'm not saying they haven't made mistakes, but saying a place had "no major connections" is both wrong and ignores why. El Paso has "major" connections to New Mexico. It shouldn't be surprising Dallas doesn't have "major" connections to New Mexico, just like Denver CO doesn't to Portland OR.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Adaptation

It's not that in Northern climates, it's PV+batteries+Natural Gas turbines, because PV doesn't supply enough power for winter heating. In more tropical locations, you're correct.