Not necessarily. Similar to software, each nine costs (in money, pollution, effort, etc) at least an order of magnitude more than the last, and at some point it's more efficient to focus on resilience elsewhere in the system.
Wind and solar are great but they're far too irregular to rely on so in places without hydro storage you're often left with either chemical batteries, which would be prohibitively expensive to support the entire grid for a few days, or fossil fuel peaker plants, which will ultimately result in coastal flooding.
One alternative has been to use demand response to pay people to cut back and dynamic (wholesale) prices to encourage people to conserve when supplies are low. Perhaps at some point electricity providers could even institute different prices for different levels of service. That is, one would pay $1/kWh for any capacity that requires less than an hour of downtime per year like servers and medical equipment, but $0.01/kWh for excess capacity used for vehicle charging that is irregularly available day-to-day. The "smart grid" and meters necessary to support this kind of thing don't exist, but may in the future, and adapting to this kind of irregularity would allow us to have a much lower-cost electricity grid.
Not necessarily. Similar to software, each nine costs (in money, pollution, effort, etc) at least an order of magnitude more than the last, and at some point it's more efficient to focus on resilience elsewhere in the system.
Wind and solar are great but they're far too irregular to rely on so in places without hydro storage you're often left with either chemical batteries, which would be prohibitively expensive to support the entire grid for a few days, or fossil fuel peaker plants, which will ultimately result in coastal flooding.
One alternative has been to use demand response to pay people to cut back and dynamic (wholesale) prices to encourage people to conserve when supplies are low. Perhaps at some point electricity providers could even institute different prices for different levels of service. That is, one would pay $1/kWh for any capacity that requires less than an hour of downtime per year like servers and medical equipment, but $0.01/kWh for excess capacity used for vehicle charging that is irregularly available day-to-day. The "smart grid" and meters necessary to support this kind of thing don't exist, but may in the future, and adapting to this kind of irregularity would allow us to have a much lower-cost electricity grid.