@
Elessar Right, but those other forms of life will also respirate and decompose on a pretty fast timescale. There's no shortage of carbon in the environment for life on Earth to exploit. It's good to have more trees and stuff, but carbon in the soil isn't a limiting factor there.
The sun is reliable in a lot of places, but it's still intermittent in that you only get significant amounts during the day. Tidal power has a similar problem, since power production peaks when the tides are going in or out. Wind power is cool, but keep in mind that (to my understanding), that's still dependent on weather systems which come and go, and those systems can span the size of a continent at peak. So unless we're gonna build all these power cables between continents, we're still gonna get huge variations. Offshore wind power can help remedy this, but idk by how much, & obviously that's gonna bring its own expenses. Geothermal is very based though.
You can definitely get benefits from diversification, sure, and you can definitely transfer power over hundreds or thousands of miles to further benefit from diversification. But diversification can do relatively little for large, geographical trends like day/night cycles, tides, and inclement weather because of high covariances within the same power sources. Transporting power over longer distances means more waste in transit, more risk of power lines being damaged, and more political risk (as you cross national borders).
Aside from that, the ability to store power capacity is a lot more economical than having to burn off excess supply. Using the kind of system you're talking about, you'd basically have to brute force your energy production so such that peak consumption never dips below minimum production -- which is random -- and that kinda means having way more energy than you need most of the time.
sorry for wall of text