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>"hey fossil fuels, let's 1v1" sincerely, solar Let's do it. Let's see how well solar does at night, or on a cloudy day, or during winters, or evenings, or ear

>"hey fossil fuels, let's 1v1" sincerely, solar Let's do it. Let's see how well solar does at night, or on a cloudy day, or during winters, or evenings, or early in the mornings. The problem with solar (and wind) is not really the price. The problem is that it is intermittent power source that cannot, by itself, power a modern economy and there is no battery technology to bridge the intermittency gap. That's why it needs to be paired with natural gas (or bio-fuels, or another carbon-based energy source) to make it remotely viable. This is why natural gas companies are one of the biggest lobby groups for wind and solar. Worse, wind and solar are atrocious for nuclear, because nuclear cannot wind-up and wind-down the way a natural gas generator can.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
WhompingWindows 7y ago
This is one of the most blatantly pro-fossil, anti-renewable posts I have seen on HN. First off, yes there is battery technology to bridge the gap. Solar+battery storage is an increasingly common purchase for utilities today, there are home-batteries for purchase for consumers from multiple companies. To say battery storage doesn't exist and isn't cheaper than oil/coal grid power is simply false. Second, renewables can have higher capacity factors than many fossil-fuel plants, so saying they're intermittent and fossil-fuel is not is false. Surely, solar is weaker in winter, but wind is stronger at night, and seasonal storage is the main issue here. Yes, we will be using natural gas for winter and certain Northerly regions for decades to come, but it will become increasingly niche/reserve as batteries, solar, and wind get even cheaper. Renewables absolutely do not need to be paired with natural gas to make it "remotely viable". There are numerous markets with very high % of renewables already, and it turns out utility operators are very smart and know how to plan very well. Renewables can reach very high market penetration, given solar is a day resource and wind is a night resource, in general. The main issue is bringing demand response online to tailor your loads to fit your renewables: charge EVs, batteries, use AC/heating, industrial processes, all can be tailored to the price of electricity, given a smart utility.
- xkde 7y ago
  And the article is blatantly pro-renewable, what’s your point? If anything, the parent comment brings up issues that are often ignored and glossed over.
- gridlockd 7y ago
  > First off, yes there is battery technology to bridge the gap. Not really, worldwide production capacity is several magnitudes below what would be necessary to buffer a large renewable rollout. The most realistic way to do it is natural gas, as they do in Australia. Plus, current battery production requires materials that are highly problematic from an environmental standpoint. > There are numerous markets with very high % of renewables already, and it turns out utility operators are very smart and know how to plan very well. Which ones would that be? Look at Germany: Total failure to reduce CO2, high reliance on coal. Look at Australia: Supported almost entirely by natural gas. Those are the biggest rollouts of wind energy besides China, but you cannot trust any numbers coming out of China.
  - Bantros 7y ago
    Heretic!
  - Dylan16807 7y ago
    > Not really, worldwide production capacity is several magnitudes below what would be necessary to buffer a large renewable rollout. Which definition of 'buffer' are you using here? Enough to supply day to day drops, or some kind of year-round system? Wind and solar would need to scale up two orders of magnitude, and it's not hard to imagine batteries scaling along with them. How many more orders of magnitude would batteries need to scale up?
    - ClumsyPilot 7y ago
      Current battery production is tiny, services small consumer electeonics and some cars. It's at least two orders of magnitude. Day to day drops are realistic, but buffering from summer to winter is out of question really.
dymk 7y ago
How about when a single centralized oil refinery gets bombed by an unhappy middle-eastern country and your global productivity drops 5%?
- gridlockd 7y ago
  Global oil production is artificially constrained, it could be increased substantially if producers weren't afraid that prices would tank.
  - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    Which demonstrates nicely how absurdly broken our dependence on fossil fuels is.
- macspoofing 7y ago
  How about the fact that we know that fossil fuels and nuclear (and hydro and geothermal if the geography allows it) can actually power a modern economy? Is there a comparable example you can point to where solar or wind successfully replaced traditional power generators? You don't have to convince me fossil fuels are shitty and need to be replaced. I'm with you. Tell me how solar/wind replaces those.
  - dymk 7y ago
    Batteries and building _more_ of it. Batteries work. We know how to store energy. And we don't need some perfect, uber efficient storage system yet to at least begin heavily investing. Fossil fuels have an artificial advantage simply due to oil subsidies. Even Germany is 20% wind power already.
    - macspoofing 7y ago
      >Batteries and building _more_ of it. Batteries work. Point me to a battery deployment that can store enough energy to power a modern reasonably-sized city for even hours at a time, much less days or weeks. That Tesla battery deployment in Australia? It provides a few seconds of energy. >We know how to store energy. No. We don't. Not at the scale we need to power an economy. That's the problem. >Even Germany is 20% wind power already. Sure. And the rest? Germany is signing multi-decade, multi-billion dollar deals with autocratic Russia to import their natural gas. Is that because they believe that wind and solar can fully replace fossil fuels? Or is that they know, that solar and wind have a hard ceiling on how much power they can provide and the rest needs to be bridged by burning natural gas, or coal, or biofuels (i.e. garbage, or corn, or whatever) to make it work?
NeedMoreTea 7y ago
I wholly agree with your start - let's do it. The best example we have so far is the Orkneys. Tiny, but a nett power exporter built on renewables, and managing easily. A proper example is sorely needed. Kit out a nation with wholly solar, wind, hydro etc. Add whatever pumped storage and battery the grid might require. Start moving to modern standards of insulation and community heat and power schemes. Stable, secure, and cheaper heat and power. If, as you claim, there is a gap in the capability of renewables (which I don't believe for a moment), we need to learn how large it is, as soon as possible. I suspect it's only vested interests stopping us.
- ThomPete 7y ago
  Wind and solar produced electricity. Electricity is a subset of energy (around 20% i think) Last summer in Denmark was amazing. The best we have had in a long time, the result was that the wind didn't blow wich meant no energy. So Denmark had to buy their energy from Germany, another country who is all in on trying to use alternatives. Of course that couldnt' deliver and instead they got energy from coal. There is so much misinformation going on when it comes to how wonderful solar and wind is. The reality is that they are less than 1% of the worlds energy production and not projected to be more than around 30% in 2040. In short. You are as wrong as you can be with regards to your believe in wind and solar. Hydro is better but only works in some places.
  - CalRobert 7y ago
    Shame they couldn't buy it from France.
    - himlion 7y ago
      That's why a lot of big power lines between European nations are being upgraded so the grid will become more flexible in the future.
  - adrianN 7y ago
    Solar growth projections vs reality: https://steinbuch.wordpress.com/2017/06/12/photovoltaic-growth-reality-versus-projections-of-the-international-energy-agency/ https://steinbuch.wordpress.com/2017/06/12/photovoltaic-grow... Electricity can be used to replace all uses of energy we have today more or less economically. AFAIK anything but airplanes has replacements that are as good or better than the fossil fuel variant. Problematic are things like concrete and steel production, where we don't have good replacements yet.
lightedman 7y ago
" Let's see how well solar does at night, or on a cloudy day, or during winters, or evenings, or early in the mornings." Hi, I work in solar, specifically cell and panel design and construction and testing. You're so dead wrong in your assumptive non-answering statement that you might as well just bury yourself. Signed ~someone with real semiconductor experience - what do you have?
agumonkey 7y ago
That's a fair argument. Allow to counter this with: how much of this modern economy do we need ? - high distance vs local - high output ? (we waste 30% of food, have tons of electronic waste too) - high frequency vs calm I'm not trying to troll you, I'm really asking people to consider how much of this feverish economy we need. If we cut fossil fuel for most and keep it for those with too low solar input, how would be our current society ? It annoys me to know end when people consider the world as a fixed absolute best. Especially since there are clearly flaws.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

WhompingWindows 7y ago

This is one of the most blatantly pro-fossil, anti-renewable posts I have seen on HN. First off, yes there is battery technology to bridge the gap. Solar+battery storage is an increasingly common purchase for utilities today, there are home-batteries for purchase for consumers from multiple companies. To say battery storage doesn't exist and isn't cheaper than oil/coal grid power is simply false. Second, renewables can have higher capacity factors than many fossil-fuel plants, so saying they're intermittent and fossil-fuel is not is false. Surely, solar is weaker in winter, but wind is stronger at night, and seasonal storage is the main issue here. Yes, we will be using natural gas for winter and certain Northerly regions for decades to come, but it will become increasingly niche/reserve as batteries, solar, and wind get even cheaper. Renewables absolutely do not need to be paired with natural gas to make it "remotely viable". There are numerous markets with very high % of renewables already, and it turns out utility operators are very smart and know how to plan very well. Renewables can reach very high market penetration, given solar is a day resource and wind is a night resource, in general. The main issue is bringing demand response online to tailor your loads to fit your renewables: charge EVs, batteries, use AC/heating, industrial processes, all can be tailored to the price of electricity, given a smart utility.

xkde 7y ago
And the article is blatantly pro-renewable, what’s your point? If anything, the parent comment brings up issues that are often ignored and glossed over.
gridlockd 7y ago
> First off, yes there is battery technology to bridge the gap. Not really, worldwide production capacity is several magnitudes below what would be necessary to buffer a large renewable rollout. The most realistic way to do it is natural gas, as they do in Australia. Plus, current battery production requires materials that are highly problematic from an environmental standpoint. > There are numerous markets with very high % of renewables already, and it turns out utility operators are very smart and know how to plan very well. Which ones would that be? Look at Germany: Total failure to reduce CO2, high reliance on coal. Look at Australia: Supported almost entirely by natural gas. Those are the biggest rollouts of wind energy besides China, but you cannot trust any numbers coming out of China.
- Bantros 7y ago
  Heretic!
- Dylan16807 7y ago
  > Not really, worldwide production capacity is several magnitudes below what would be necessary to buffer a large renewable rollout. Which definition of 'buffer' are you using here? Enough to supply day to day drops, or some kind of year-round system? Wind and solar would need to scale up two orders of magnitude, and it's not hard to imagine batteries scaling along with them. How many more orders of magnitude would batteries need to scale up?
  - ClumsyPilot 7y ago
    Current battery production is tiny, services small consumer electeonics and some cars. It's at least two orders of magnitude. Day to day drops are realistic, but buffering from summer to winter is out of question really.

dymk 7y ago

How about when a single centralized oil refinery gets bombed by an unhappy middle-eastern country and your global productivity drops 5%?

gridlockd 7y ago
Global oil production is artificially constrained, it could be increased substantially if producers weren't afraid that prices would tank.
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  Which demonstrates nicely how absurdly broken our dependence on fossil fuels is.
macspoofing 7y ago
How about the fact that we know that fossil fuels and nuclear (and hydro and geothermal if the geography allows it) can actually power a modern economy? Is there a comparable example you can point to where solar or wind successfully replaced traditional power generators? You don't have to convince me fossil fuels are shitty and need to be replaced. I'm with you. Tell me how solar/wind replaces those.
- dymk 7y ago
  Batteries and building _more_ of it. Batteries work. We know how to store energy. And we don't need some perfect, uber efficient storage system yet to at least begin heavily investing. Fossil fuels have an artificial advantage simply due to oil subsidies. Even Germany is 20% wind power already.
  - macspoofing 7y ago
    >Batteries and building _more_ of it. Batteries work. Point me to a battery deployment that can store enough energy to power a modern reasonably-sized city for even hours at a time, much less days or weeks. That Tesla battery deployment in Australia? It provides a few seconds of energy. >We know how to store energy. No. We don't. Not at the scale we need to power an economy. That's the problem. >Even Germany is 20% wind power already. Sure. And the rest? Germany is signing multi-decade, multi-billion dollar deals with autocratic Russia to import their natural gas. Is that because they believe that wind and solar can fully replace fossil fuels? Or is that they know, that solar and wind have a hard ceiling on how much power they can provide and the rest needs to be bridged by burning natural gas, or coal, or biofuels (i.e. garbage, or corn, or whatever) to make it work?

NeedMoreTea 7y ago

I wholly agree with your start - let's do it. The best example we have so far is the Orkneys. Tiny, but a nett power exporter built on renewables, and managing easily. A proper example is sorely needed. Kit out a nation with wholly solar, wind, hydro etc. Add whatever pumped storage and battery the grid might require. Start moving to modern standards of insulation and community heat and power schemes. Stable, secure, and cheaper heat and power. If, as you claim, there is a gap in the capability of renewables (which I don't believe for a moment), we need to learn how large it is, as soon as possible. I suspect it's only vested interests stopping us.

ThomPete 7y ago
Wind and solar produced electricity. Electricity is a subset of energy (around 20% i think) Last summer in Denmark was amazing. The best we have had in a long time, the result was that the wind didn't blow wich meant no energy. So Denmark had to buy their energy from Germany, another country who is all in on trying to use alternatives. Of course that couldnt' deliver and instead they got energy from coal. There is so much misinformation going on when it comes to how wonderful solar and wind is. The reality is that they are less than 1% of the worlds energy production and not projected to be more than around 30% in 2040. In short. You are as wrong as you can be with regards to your believe in wind and solar. Hydro is better but only works in some places.
- CalRobert 7y ago
  Shame they couldn't buy it from France.
  - himlion 7y ago
    That's why a lot of big power lines between European nations are being upgraded so the grid will become more flexible in the future.
- adrianN 7y ago
  Solar growth projections vs reality: https://steinbuch.wordpress.com/2017/06/12/photovoltaic-growth-reality-versus-projections-of-the-international-energy-agency/ https://steinbuch.wordpress.com/2017/06/12/photovoltaic-grow... Electricity can be used to replace all uses of energy we have today more or less economically. AFAIK anything but airplanes has replacements that are as good or better than the fossil fuel variant. Problematic are things like concrete and steel production, where we don't have good replacements yet.

lightedman 7y ago

" Let's see how well solar does at night, or on a cloudy day, or during winters, or evenings, or early in the mornings." Hi, I work in solar, specifically cell and panel design and construction and testing. You're so dead wrong in your assumptive non-answering statement that you might as well just bury yourself. Signed ~someone with real semiconductor experience - what do you have?

agumonkey 7y ago

That's a fair argument. Allow to counter this with: how much of this modern economy do we need ? - high distance vs local - high output ? (we waste 30% of food, have tons of electronic waste too) - high frequency vs calm I'm not trying to troll you, I'm really asking people to consider how much of this feverish economy we need. If we cut fossil fuel for most and keep it for those with too low solar input, how would be our current society ? It annoys me to know end when people consider the world as a fixed absolute best. Especially since there are clearly flaws.