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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+batte

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.
    - Dylan16807 7y ago
      > Current battery production is tiny, services small consumer electeonics and some cars. It's at least two orders of magnitude. That is 100% fine. It only has to scale as fast as the power production. If they're both scaling two orders of magnitude, they should work hand in hand just fine. > Day to day drops are realistic, but buffering from summer to winter is out of question really. Good! Day to day is all you need. It's ridiculous to use batteries between seasons, and there are far better technologies to use.
      - ClumsyPilot 7y ago
        Battery production needs to scale about two extra orders of magnitude- current production can't backup current renewables. The current battery prices are reflective of relatively small spale, high value needs of consumer electronics industry and a nascent electric car industry. Hopefully the price will drop massively, like it did for solar panels, but currently we can't even produce enough for cars
kortilla 7y ago
>To say battery storage doesn't exist and isn't cheaper than oil/coal grid power is simply false. If that were true, nobody would be using either fossil source. Of course it’s not cheaper. Battery technology costs so much it’s the whole reason we have the base load discussion all of the time.
- beat 7y ago
  Transitions take time. We can't just flip a switch from one technology to another. What we are seeing is that the cost drop over the past decade for wind/solar/gas is so drastic that coal and nuclear are simply shutting down, because it's cheaper to shutter the plant than to keep it running. Electric utilities are taking multi-billion dollar writeoffs, because that tech is obsolete. Nobody is building coal plants now, period. Most of the nuclear projects on the drawing board are getting canceled before ground is broken, because they can't hit the necessary price targets.
  - ClumsyPilot 7y ago
    The main problem with nuclear in the west is mismanagement and loss of skills amongst construction and engineering staff. Many countries haven't built a nuclear powerplant in decades, and are having difficult now. China is doing much better, and so is France and even Russia is doing ok, as they have a larger and more experienced workforce regularly building reactors. I live in the UK and for the past decade every major construction project I can remember was massively delayed and over budget. Currently its HS2 and crossrail. So the faults don't appear to be specific to nuclear in industry.
    - pfdietz 7y ago
      Nuclear failed to hits its price points in the US even back in the first building boom. There was never a time here when nuclear was economical.
- pfdietz 7y ago
  > If that were true, nobody would be using either fossil source. Sunk costs are a thing.
hokkos 7y ago
No, it just expose the realities of that market, seasonal storage is not a solved problem. Why would it be pro fossil ? Battery do not solve seasonal storage, for the USA it needs 8 to 16 weeks of it, and Tesla global battery output is just a few minutes of it per years. Higher capacity factor still doesn't mean on demand. Markets with very high % of renewables all benefits form big hydro or geothermal sources, it doesn't apply in every countries.
- lightedman 7y ago
  "No, it just expose the realities of that market, seasonal storage is not a solved problem." It's called a flywheel, batteries, pumps to power hydro reservoirs, and more. The solutions are there, you refuse to see them.
- beat 7y ago
  Technically, storage is a solved problem. It's not even hard, and y'all keep saying it's impossible. The unsolved problem is cost. And it's a simple formula... how much grid storage is needed to account for variations? And what does that storage cost? The moment the combined wind/solar + storage cost drops below the cost of coal/nuclear, it wins. And intermittency for wind is completely overblown (no pun intended). Tower-height winds are much steadier than surface-height winds, due to lack of surface-related turbulence. And we have a couple of decades of measurement of large wind installations, so the expected variation isn't exactly a surprise unknown.
macspoofing 7y ago
I want to someone to lay out for me what a solar/wind grid would look like. I WANT to be convinced. How is the intermittency gap actually bridged. Tell me. I WANT to know. >There are numerous markets with very high % of renewables already And what do those markets do when the sun ain't shining and wind ain't blowing? >all can be tailored to the price of electricity, given a smart utility. And this 'smart utility' it exists in the real world? Where?
- adrianN 7y ago
  You build a shitton of wind and solar and a good grid that is as large as possible so that it's always windy somewhere in your grid. Peak production capacity should be a good bit higher than peak consumption. During the buildout phase you replace coal with gas peaker plants (you'll need them later). Then you add enough batteries and hydro storage to get you through a night or a bad day. If you can, use demand shaping technologies, e.g. charge electric cars and run aluminium smelters when it's particularly sunny or windy. Then you add power-to-gas facilities that produce Methane from electricity and use the existing infrastructure for strategic NG reserves to store it. For long periods of low production (e.g. winter) you turn the gas back into electricity. How much wind and solar you need depends on how good you are with lowering demand, for example by insulating homes, shifting transportation to trains and building heat pumps.
  - mlyle 7y ago
    > Then you add power-to-gas facilities that produce Methane from electricity and use the existing infrastructure for strategic NG reserves to store it. For long periods of low production (e.g. winter) you turn the gas back into electricity. The efficiency of this process is like 35%. (power to gas to power with methane). If you're making a bunch of methane anyways, it might be OK to fill in a little with this, but this does not sound like a great overall strategy. Why not just throw in a little nuclear for base load, and then everything looks a lot better/easier?
    - adrianN 7y ago
      I'm in favor of doing that, but I don't think it's necessary or helps a whole lot. Nuclear power plants need to run close to max capacity all the time to make financial sense at all. So you can't use them to bridge over low production for wind and solar. They also take ages to build. Nuclear might make sense for district heating in winter, but people generally don't like having nuclear plants close to where they live.
coldtea 7y ago
>This is one of the most blatantly pro-fossil, anti-renewable posts I have seen on HN. Reality itself is pro-fossil. Fossil fuel is very damaging, but it's also an excellent, almost free, source of huge amounts of stored energy left for us to discover and use... Solar/wind are much cleaner, but oversold. If we got rid of fossils tonight, we'd be in the dark ages for decades (if not permanently). Even building solar/wind installations, at the moment, relies on fossil fuel infrastructure, plus the traditional grid required... >First off, yes there is battery technology to bridge the gap. Not at the scale requited to bridge the gap. "home-batteries for purchase for consumers" do their job because the demand and use is still very small... >(...) so saying they're intermittent and fossil-fuel is not is false (...) Yes, we will be using natural gas for winter and certain Northerly regions for decades to come Well, they are intermittent, and fossil fuel is not. >Renewables absolutely do not need to be paired with natural gas to make it "remotely viable". You just wrote: "we will be using natural gas for winter and certain Northerly regions for decades to come"... Countries don't spend trillions on fossil fuels because "solar/wind is cheaper" and storage is "a solved problem", or because of some big conspiracy - they do it because it's not...
trekrich 7y ago
This is one of the most blatantly pro-solar and wind power comments i have seen. If we wanted to use Solar and Wind, we would have to destroy so much of the natural habitat to do it. It would not work. The damage to the planet to make all these batteries would be massive. And 100% renewables does not equal zero carbon energy. https://energy.stanford.edu/news/100-renewables-doesn-t-equal-zero-carbon-energy-and-difference-growing https://energy.stanford.edu/news/100-renewables-doesn-t-equa... Are you a stooge for solar panel industry?
belorn 7y ago
I have suggested multiple times on HN that we should set a date where all burning of fossil fuel for power and heat is banned. The answer I kept seeing from pro-renewable/anti-nuclear people is that banning fossil fuels is unrealistic and impossible. Battery is a tiny part of a tiny part when solar/wind is not producing, as can be seen in sites that provide real time data from EU. Take a random country in EU. Look at how much energy is produced by wind at peak. Compare it to the lowest lowest point, remove nuclear and hydro, and you get how much fossil fuels that country use at peak. For most countries that is natural gas or coal and it matches wind production almost (only almost as natural gas is a bit more expensive than peak wind, as peak wind can even get negative in purchasing price). There is also numbers on what power plants countries are currently building. The top one: natural gas power plants. Second one, wind. The power plants we build today is what will produce power tomorrow, and the vector of where investment and constructions is being put is in favor of more natural gas, not less. Nuclear is in many places being replaced by natural gas. But to get back on track, lets have this ban of fossil fuels in energy and heating. I wish it would happen. It would be great for the environment, force an answer with money on the table on question if nuclear is cheaper than battery, and finally distance the renewable movement away from natural gas. The Northerly regions are not really a big coal/gas users anyway because they also tend to have mountains, rivers, and few people. Hydro will work perfectly fine as long the energy does need to go to southern regions. To put it simply: countries need to stop building natural gas powers plants and put those investments into battery or nuclear. That is the progress bar for a completely renewable energy grid. As far as I can read it stand right now at almost 0%.
- teabee89 7y ago
  Thank you for being the voice of reason <3 Small correction though on your last paragraph: nuclear is not a renewable energy, but it does not emit carbon.
  - ClumsyPilot 7y ago
    Geothermal is not renewable either, but we say it is. There is so much Uranium, I would consider it "close enough"

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.
  - Dylan16807 7y ago
    > Current battery production is tiny, services small consumer electeonics and some cars. It's at least two orders of magnitude. That is 100% fine. It only has to scale as fast as the power production. If they're both scaling two orders of magnitude, they should work hand in hand just fine. > Day to day drops are realistic, but buffering from summer to winter is out of question really. Good! Day to day is all you need. It's ridiculous to use batteries between seasons, and there are far better technologies to use.
    - ClumsyPilot 7y ago
      Battery production needs to scale about two extra orders of magnitude- current production can't backup current renewables. The current battery prices are reflective of relatively small spale, high value needs of consumer electronics industry and a nascent electric car industry. Hopefully the price will drop massively, like it did for solar panels, but currently we can't even produce enough for cars

kortilla 7y ago

>To say battery storage doesn't exist and isn't cheaper than oil/coal grid power is simply false. If that were true, nobody would be using either fossil source. Of course it’s not cheaper. Battery technology costs so much it’s the whole reason we have the base load discussion all of the time.

beat 7y ago
Transitions take time. We can't just flip a switch from one technology to another. What we are seeing is that the cost drop over the past decade for wind/solar/gas is so drastic that coal and nuclear are simply shutting down, because it's cheaper to shutter the plant than to keep it running. Electric utilities are taking multi-billion dollar writeoffs, because that tech is obsolete. Nobody is building coal plants now, period. Most of the nuclear projects on the drawing board are getting canceled before ground is broken, because they can't hit the necessary price targets.
- ClumsyPilot 7y ago
  The main problem with nuclear in the west is mismanagement and loss of skills amongst construction and engineering staff. Many countries haven't built a nuclear powerplant in decades, and are having difficult now. China is doing much better, and so is France and even Russia is doing ok, as they have a larger and more experienced workforce regularly building reactors. I live in the UK and for the past decade every major construction project I can remember was massively delayed and over budget. Currently its HS2 and crossrail. So the faults don't appear to be specific to nuclear in industry.
  - pfdietz 7y ago
    Nuclear failed to hits its price points in the US even back in the first building boom. There was never a time here when nuclear was economical.
pfdietz 7y ago
> If that were true, nobody would be using either fossil source. Sunk costs are a thing.

hokkos 7y ago

No, it just expose the realities of that market, seasonal storage is not a solved problem. Why would it be pro fossil ? Battery do not solve seasonal storage, for the USA it needs 8 to 16 weeks of it, and Tesla global battery output is just a few minutes of it per years. Higher capacity factor still doesn't mean on demand. Markets with very high % of renewables all benefits form big hydro or geothermal sources, it doesn't apply in every countries.

lightedman 7y ago
"No, it just expose the realities of that market, seasonal storage is not a solved problem." It's called a flywheel, batteries, pumps to power hydro reservoirs, and more. The solutions are there, you refuse to see them.
beat 7y ago
Technically, storage is a solved problem. It's not even hard, and y'all keep saying it's impossible. The unsolved problem is cost. And it's a simple formula... how much grid storage is needed to account for variations? And what does that storage cost? The moment the combined wind/solar + storage cost drops below the cost of coal/nuclear, it wins. And intermittency for wind is completely overblown (no pun intended). Tower-height winds are much steadier than surface-height winds, due to lack of surface-related turbulence. And we have a couple of decades of measurement of large wind installations, so the expected variation isn't exactly a surprise unknown.

macspoofing 7y ago

I want to someone to lay out for me what a solar/wind grid would look like. I WANT to be convinced. How is the intermittency gap actually bridged. Tell me. I WANT to know. >There are numerous markets with very high % of renewables already And what do those markets do when the sun ain't shining and wind ain't blowing? >all can be tailored to the price of electricity, given a smart utility. And this 'smart utility' it exists in the real world? Where?

adrianN 7y ago
You build a shitton of wind and solar and a good grid that is as large as possible so that it's always windy somewhere in your grid. Peak production capacity should be a good bit higher than peak consumption. During the buildout phase you replace coal with gas peaker plants (you'll need them later). Then you add enough batteries and hydro storage to get you through a night or a bad day. If you can, use demand shaping technologies, e.g. charge electric cars and run aluminium smelters when it's particularly sunny or windy. Then you add power-to-gas facilities that produce Methane from electricity and use the existing infrastructure for strategic NG reserves to store it. For long periods of low production (e.g. winter) you turn the gas back into electricity. How much wind and solar you need depends on how good you are with lowering demand, for example by insulating homes, shifting transportation to trains and building heat pumps.
- mlyle 7y ago
  > Then you add power-to-gas facilities that produce Methane from electricity and use the existing infrastructure for strategic NG reserves to store it. For long periods of low production (e.g. winter) you turn the gas back into electricity. The efficiency of this process is like 35%. (power to gas to power with methane). If you're making a bunch of methane anyways, it might be OK to fill in a little with this, but this does not sound like a great overall strategy. Why not just throw in a little nuclear for base load, and then everything looks a lot better/easier?
  - adrianN 7y ago
    I'm in favor of doing that, but I don't think it's necessary or helps a whole lot. Nuclear power plants need to run close to max capacity all the time to make financial sense at all. So you can't use them to bridge over low production for wind and solar. They also take ages to build. Nuclear might make sense for district heating in winter, but people generally don't like having nuclear plants close to where they live.

coldtea 7y ago

>This is one of the most blatantly pro-fossil, anti-renewable posts I have seen on HN. Reality itself is pro-fossil. Fossil fuel is very damaging, but it's also an excellent, almost free, source of huge amounts of stored energy left for us to discover and use... Solar/wind are much cleaner, but oversold. If we got rid of fossils tonight, we'd be in the dark ages for decades (if not permanently). Even building solar/wind installations, at the moment, relies on fossil fuel infrastructure, plus the traditional grid required... >First off, yes there is battery technology to bridge the gap. Not at the scale requited to bridge the gap. "home-batteries for purchase for consumers" do their job because the demand and use is still very small... >(...) so saying they're intermittent and fossil-fuel is not is false (...) Yes, we will be using natural gas for winter and certain Northerly regions for decades to come Well, they are intermittent, and fossil fuel is not. >Renewables absolutely do not need to be paired with natural gas to make it "remotely viable". You just wrote: "we will be using natural gas for winter and certain Northerly regions for decades to come"... Countries don't spend trillions on fossil fuels because "solar/wind is cheaper" and storage is "a solved problem", or because of some big conspiracy - they do it because it's not...

trekrich 7y ago

This is one of the most blatantly pro-solar and wind power comments i have seen. If we wanted to use Solar and Wind, we would have to destroy so much of the natural habitat to do it. It would not work. The damage to the planet to make all these batteries would be massive. And 100% renewables does not equal zero carbon energy. https://energy.stanford.edu/news/100-renewables-doesn-t-equal-zero-carbon-energy-and-difference-growing https://energy.stanford.edu/news/100-renewables-doesn-t-equa... Are you a stooge for solar panel industry?

belorn 7y ago

I have suggested multiple times on HN that we should set a date where all burning of fossil fuel for power and heat is banned. The answer I kept seeing from pro-renewable/anti-nuclear people is that banning fossil fuels is unrealistic and impossible. Battery is a tiny part of a tiny part when solar/wind is not producing, as can be seen in sites that provide real time data from EU. Take a random country in EU. Look at how much energy is produced by wind at peak. Compare it to the lowest lowest point, remove nuclear and hydro, and you get how much fossil fuels that country use at peak. For most countries that is natural gas or coal and it matches wind production almost (only almost as natural gas is a bit more expensive than peak wind, as peak wind can even get negative in purchasing price). There is also numbers on what power plants countries are currently building. The top one: natural gas power plants. Second one, wind. The power plants we build today is what will produce power tomorrow, and the vector of where investment and constructions is being put is in favor of more natural gas, not less. Nuclear is in many places being replaced by natural gas. But to get back on track, lets have this ban of fossil fuels in energy and heating. I wish it would happen. It would be great for the environment, force an answer with money on the table on question if nuclear is cheaper than battery, and finally distance the renewable movement away from natural gas. The Northerly regions are not really a big coal/gas users anyway because they also tend to have mountains, rivers, and few people. Hydro will work perfectly fine as long the energy does need to go to southern regions. To put it simply: countries need to stop building natural gas powers plants and put those investments into battery or nuclear. That is the progress bar for a completely renewable energy grid. As far as I can read it stand right now at almost 0%.

teabee89 7y ago
Thank you for being the voice of reason <3 Small correction though on your last paragraph: nuclear is not a renewable energy, but it does not emit carbon.
- ClumsyPilot 7y ago
  Geothermal is not renewable either, but we say it is. There is so much Uranium, I would consider it "close enough"