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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 ther

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?
  - geogra4 7y ago
    > 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. https://electrek.co/2017/12/21/worlds-largest-battery-200mw-800mwh-vanadium-flow-battery-rongke-power/ https://electrek.co/2017/12/21/worlds-largest-battery-200mw-...
    - program_whiz 7y ago
      The battery’s purpose is to provide power during peak hours of demand, to enhance grid stability and deliver juice during black-start conditions in case of emergency. The system is expected to peak-shave about 8% of Dalian’s expected load when it comes online in 2020.
  - dymk 7y ago
    To be clear, fossil fuels are already insufficient to power a modern day economy without trillions of artificial subsidies. We are not in a mode where we can wait to deploy perfect technology. We will also not be going solar 100% anytime soon, but perhaps in the next few decades. The atmosphere and ocean are already unhappy, and maybe if we also invest in carbon sequestration technology we can roll back a century or so worth of damage. You're in this mindset that immediately it's all or nothing, and that's not the case. But we do need to start investing large sums of money now instead of making oil cheaper than it would normally be on a free market.
    - coldtea 7y ago
      >To be clear, fossil fuels are already insufficient to power a modern day economy without trillions of artificial subsidies. The subsidies are part of the economy too, so clearly fossil fuels are capable to power a modern day economy. Else the economy would have gone down (due to the subsidies cost). The problem with solar/wind is that even with the same or larger subsidies we haven't yet solved many problems for powering a modern economy with them. Even if we had a huge budget to do so with just the proviso that no fossil/nuclear is used. And that doesn't even include the problem of replacing the fossil fuel based infrastructure itself. We don't even have enough electric battery making capacity for double the insignificant amount of electric cars sold now for example, much less for replacing every gas based car with an electric equivalent... The
  - Dylan16807 7y ago
    > 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. Let's see. 129 Megawatt-hours. The 20th largest city in Australia has about 90 thousand people. One estimate says that if this battery is drained at the designed 100MW it can power 30 thousand homes. And there's 2.6 people per household. So if the battery was adjusted to drain at 115MW it would power that city for over an hour. Another estimate is that Australia averages 10MWh per person per year, that's about 103 megawatts for 90k people. So if we pick the 23rd largest city instead then we can supply 100% of the city's power with this single installation for well over an hour. That's a lot better than "a few seconds". You can't drain lithium ion batteries in "a few seconds" anyway. And for that many people, it cost around a thousand dollars each. With electricity around 30 cents a kWh, you could take a third of that and install another hour of battery each year.
    - coldtea 7y ago
      >So if we pick the 23rd largest city instead then we can supply 100% of the city's power with this single installation for well over an hour. Color me unimpressed. >That's a lot better than "a few seconds". It's also a lot smaller than any city that matters. 90K people is more like a town (and small at that) than a city... It would be seconds for a city with a few million people...
      - Dylan16807 7y ago
        > It would be seconds for a city with a few million people... Australia only has two of those. If you get picky enough about what counts as a city, then the problem solves itself; they become irrelevant compared to the bulk of the population. You don't need one facility to feed an entire city. What matters are the per capita numbers. $1000 per head, lasts an entire hour. Install 300 of those batteries and it will cover the entire country. And "seconds" is still wrong. Brisbane, Perth, and Adelaide. 3rd, 4th, and 5th largest cities in the entire country. If you feed one of them off 129 megawatt hours, it's somewhere in the low hundreds of seconds.

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?
- geogra4 7y ago
  > 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. https://electrek.co/2017/12/21/worlds-largest-battery-200mw-800mwh-vanadium-flow-battery-rongke-power/ https://electrek.co/2017/12/21/worlds-largest-battery-200mw-...
  - program_whiz 7y ago
    The battery’s purpose is to provide power during peak hours of demand, to enhance grid stability and deliver juice during black-start conditions in case of emergency. The system is expected to peak-shave about 8% of Dalian’s expected load when it comes online in 2020.
- dymk 7y ago
  To be clear, fossil fuels are already insufficient to power a modern day economy without trillions of artificial subsidies. We are not in a mode where we can wait to deploy perfect technology. We will also not be going solar 100% anytime soon, but perhaps in the next few decades. The atmosphere and ocean are already unhappy, and maybe if we also invest in carbon sequestration technology we can roll back a century or so worth of damage. You're in this mindset that immediately it's all or nothing, and that's not the case. But we do need to start investing large sums of money now instead of making oil cheaper than it would normally be on a free market.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    >To be clear, fossil fuels are already insufficient to power a modern day economy without trillions of artificial subsidies. The subsidies are part of the economy too, so clearly fossil fuels are capable to power a modern day economy. Else the economy would have gone down (due to the subsidies cost). The problem with solar/wind is that even with the same or larger subsidies we haven't yet solved many problems for powering a modern economy with them. Even if we had a huge budget to do so with just the proviso that no fossil/nuclear is used. And that doesn't even include the problem of replacing the fossil fuel based infrastructure itself. We don't even have enough electric battery making capacity for double the insignificant amount of electric cars sold now for example, much less for replacing every gas based car with an electric equivalent... The
- Dylan16807 7y ago
  > 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. Let's see. 129 Megawatt-hours. The 20th largest city in Australia has about 90 thousand people. One estimate says that if this battery is drained at the designed 100MW it can power 30 thousand homes. And there's 2.6 people per household. So if the battery was adjusted to drain at 115MW it would power that city for over an hour. Another estimate is that Australia averages 10MWh per person per year, that's about 103 megawatts for 90k people. So if we pick the 23rd largest city instead then we can supply 100% of the city's power with this single installation for well over an hour. That's a lot better than "a few seconds". You can't drain lithium ion batteries in "a few seconds" anyway. And for that many people, it cost around a thousand dollars each. With electricity around 30 cents a kWh, you could take a third of that and install another hour of battery each year.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    >So if we pick the 23rd largest city instead then we can supply 100% of the city's power with this single installation for well over an hour. Color me unimpressed. >That's a lot better than "a few seconds". It's also a lot smaller than any city that matters. 90K people is more like a town (and small at that) than a city... It would be seconds for a city with a few million people...
    - Dylan16807 7y ago
      > It would be seconds for a city with a few million people... Australia only has two of those. If you get picky enough about what counts as a city, then the problem solves itself; they become irrelevant compared to the bulk of the population. You don't need one facility to feed an entire city. What matters are the per capita numbers. $1000 per head, lasts an entire hour. Install 300 of those batteries and it will cover the entire country. And "seconds" is still wrong. Brisbane, Perth, and Adelaide. 3rd, 4th, and 5th largest cities in the entire country. If you feed one of them off 129 megawatt hours, it's somewhere in the low hundreds of seconds.