alt Hacker News"But what if thing thing that never happens were to happen?"
We'd probably go deep into hydro, fire up every gas peaker plant, and through skyrocketing prices incentivize everyone to switch to emergency diesel generators where possible.
You're talking about a once-in-100+-years event. We'll deal with it the same way we dealt with the various oil crises.
You can't fire up capacity you don't have. Your scenario implies a massive idle stock of power plants.
Who's going to build and run them? They'd be enormously expensive because they'd almost never sell power.
(Of course the answer is if you build 3 weeks of battery storage you can pretty obviously build 4).