12 ms·

I can't understand the downvotes you got. You pushed may be a bit on political stereotypes, but other than that you just stated the facts.

by pif 6y ago

realusername 6y ago
That's where we are at right now, just stating the energy facts are considered political... There's no realistic scenario at the moment where renewables can be used alone to build a grid for a full country unless you are betting on future tech which doesn't (and might never) exist.
- cygx 6y ago
  Because it's overstating the facts ("no other source", "seen only in Star Trek", "as much understanding of energy as flat earthers do of geography", "ridiculous"), contradicting any study on the topic I've seen (which, to be fair, might have been a biased sample). This was my take-away when I looked into it a couple of years ago: Going 60% renewable is not much of a problem. 80% needs investment into infrastructure, but still viable. 100% would need better storage technology - or the political will to make cuts: You first need to build enough off-shore windparks, storage and smarter grids to get you through the 'Dunkelflaute' (simultaneous reduced energy production from solar and on-shore wind due to weather conditions, sometimes for weeks!). There's nothing that prevents us from doing so with the technology of today if we're prepared to adjust to uneven levels of power generation, eg by shutting down some industries when production is low, and dumping excess power somewhere when it's high (smelting, scientific experiments, bitcoin mining, whatever).
  - orwin 6y ago
    We don't need 100% renewable, we need 350% renewable. Electricity is at best 25% of our energy usage. 20% of the energy i'm consumming everyday come from nuclear and i'm living in France, where 80% of our power grid is nuclear. And we need the grid investment in copper that comme with it if we want a distributed grid. And a secondary grid to serve hospital and emergency buildings. Oh, and we need Veolia's solar panel recycling plant: its economical, recylce 91 to 95% of the product (granted, the less important part) and it only cost 8 time the raw materials, making it the most efficient solar panel recycling plant (and the only one in the world of its size). It also cost 5 time the energy of raw material extraction and transformation, and weirdly, this is never taken into account when the cost of solar PV is on the table, as if everyone think we can just put lead and cadmium in a landfill. Oh yeah, that's right, we can and we did, nice job us.
  - pif 6y ago
    > There's nothing that prevents us from doing so with the technology of today if we're prepared to ... We are not prepared to, neither do we want to.
DrBazza 6y ago
There's a lot of anti-nuclear sentiment on HN. Anyone that's in favour of it seems to always get downvoted.
- notacoward 6y ago
  Is that due to a high prevalence of anti-nuclear sentiment, or due to a high prevalence of enthusiastic, dismissive, and possibly inauthentic pro-nuclear sentiment? Either could explain the observed effect. There are plenty of pro-nuclear comments that aren't being downvoted. I suggest you consider that others are for reasons beyond their basic premise.
  - DrBazza 6y ago
    It's probably nothing more than "science don't care what you believe". There's a lot of nuance lost in writing plain text on the Internet vs. having a physical conversation with one. Few people, if any, have ever been convinced to change their view point based on Internet discussion. People mostly choose their beliefs regardless of facts or science.
- pfdietz 6y ago
  There's a lot of aggressively clueless pro-nuclear sentiment. It gets downvoted because of the cluelessness, not because it's pro-nuclear. One does wonder why the pro-nuclear arguments are so often so egregiously flawed. It's almost as if good arguments for nuclear are difficult to find.
derriz 6y ago
Are the downvotes really hard to understand? Claiming that renewables are untenable without unavailable fantasy technology is clearly ill-informed. Renewables are already contributing a significant proportion of generated electricity globally - even in the US it's over 20% versus 8% for nuclear. In many European countries, renewables provide over 30% of the consumed electricity. Renewables are already a big part of electricity generation globally despite the lack of star-trek type batteries. Then the poster turns to politics, suggesting it's just hippies and liberals who have prevented the triumph of nuclear. This is also clearly untrue - the main reason nuclear has all but been abandoned as a source of electricity was decided by the markets - it's just too expensive - without massive government backing nuclear is not economically feasible. Until the 80s, government support was justified because nuclear expertise and materials had military uses but without government support, there hasn't been a single privately financed/build nuclear plant anywhere.
- Hammershaft 6y ago
  > In many European countries, renewables provide over 30% of the consumed electricity. Renewables are already a big part of electricity generation globally despite the lack of star-trek type batteries. Getting to a fraction of total power demand requires no batteries at all, but that doesn't disprove the OPs point.
- pif 6y ago
  > In many European countries, renewables provide over 30% of the consumed electricity. That fraction is not very important, unless you can name at least a country who is ready to devote all its renewable enrgy to 30% of their people/services/industries and permanently disconnect them from traditional energy sources.
- pif 6y ago
  > Until the 80s You mean until Chernobyl?
- evilos 6y ago
  You can have a big part of your energy generation come from renewables easily (as you pointed out). The hard/impossible part is making renewables the main or only source of power. That requires an insane amount of energy storage capacity, or an amazing electric grid or some combination of these. The US uses 11 Terawatt hours of electric energy every day. Studies project that 80% renewable generation would require 12 hours of battery storage, so 5.5 TWHrs of battery storage. 100% renewable energy needs 3 weeks of storage. Current global production of battery capacity is 300 GWHrs per year. Production is expected to quadruple in 10 years. By these numbers producing enough batteries for the world is not feasible. Also consider that these batteries will need to be recycled and this is a pretty dirty process (currently). Personally, I think the best plan for now is a mix of base load nuclear power(maybe like 20 to 30% of peak demand) and the rest being solar/wind. In the US we'd need to build out thousands of miles of HVDC transmission lines and build lots of battery banks.
konjin 6y ago
Ever noticed how liberals say "do you believe in global warming?" and not "do you understand global warming?" it's not about knowing science, it's about using "science" to defend whatever your group happens to believe. This is not science, this is dogma masquerading as science. For some reason liberals have been allowed to think they are pro-science for the last 20 years when in the most important cases of our time they are not. They need to have it bashed into their skulls that they are not pro-science and that they are responsible for the coming apocalypse.

I can't understand the downvotes you got. You pushed may be a bit on political stereotypes, but other than that you just stated the facts.

by pif 6y ago

I can't understand the downvotes you got. You pushed may be a bit on political stereotypes, but other than that you just stated the facts.

realusername 6y ago

That's where we are at right now, just stating the energy facts are considered political... There's no realistic scenario at the moment where renewables can be used alone to build a grid for a full country unless you are betting on future tech which doesn't (and might never) exist.

cygx 6y ago
Because it's overstating the facts ("no other source", "seen only in Star Trek", "as much understanding of energy as flat earthers do of geography", "ridiculous"), contradicting any study on the topic I've seen (which, to be fair, might have been a biased sample). This was my take-away when I looked into it a couple of years ago: Going 60% renewable is not much of a problem. 80% needs investment into infrastructure, but still viable. 100% would need better storage technology - or the political will to make cuts: You first need to build enough off-shore windparks, storage and smarter grids to get you through the 'Dunkelflaute' (simultaneous reduced energy production from solar and on-shore wind due to weather conditions, sometimes for weeks!). There's nothing that prevents us from doing so with the technology of today if we're prepared to adjust to uneven levels of power generation, eg by shutting down some industries when production is low, and dumping excess power somewhere when it's high (smelting, scientific experiments, bitcoin mining, whatever).
- orwin 6y ago
  We don't need 100% renewable, we need 350% renewable. Electricity is at best 25% of our energy usage. 20% of the energy i'm consumming everyday come from nuclear and i'm living in France, where 80% of our power grid is nuclear. And we need the grid investment in copper that comme with it if we want a distributed grid. And a secondary grid to serve hospital and emergency buildings. Oh, and we need Veolia's solar panel recycling plant: its economical, recylce 91 to 95% of the product (granted, the less important part) and it only cost 8 time the raw materials, making it the most efficient solar panel recycling plant (and the only one in the world of its size). It also cost 5 time the energy of raw material extraction and transformation, and weirdly, this is never taken into account when the cost of solar PV is on the table, as if everyone think we can just put lead and cadmium in a landfill. Oh yeah, that's right, we can and we did, nice job us.
- pif 6y ago
  > There's nothing that prevents us from doing so with the technology of today if we're prepared to ... We are not prepared to, neither do we want to.

DrBazza 6y ago

There's a lot of anti-nuclear sentiment on HN. Anyone that's in favour of it seems to always get downvoted.

notacoward 6y ago
Is that due to a high prevalence of anti-nuclear sentiment, or due to a high prevalence of enthusiastic, dismissive, and possibly inauthentic pro-nuclear sentiment? Either could explain the observed effect. There are plenty of pro-nuclear comments that aren't being downvoted. I suggest you consider that others are for reasons beyond their basic premise.
- DrBazza 6y ago
  It's probably nothing more than "science don't care what you believe". There's a lot of nuance lost in writing plain text on the Internet vs. having a physical conversation with one. Few people, if any, have ever been convinced to change their view point based on Internet discussion. People mostly choose their beliefs regardless of facts or science.
pfdietz 6y ago
There's a lot of aggressively clueless pro-nuclear sentiment. It gets downvoted because of the cluelessness, not because it's pro-nuclear. One does wonder why the pro-nuclear arguments are so often so egregiously flawed. It's almost as if good arguments for nuclear are difficult to find.

derriz 6y ago

Are the downvotes really hard to understand? Claiming that renewables are untenable without unavailable fantasy technology is clearly ill-informed. Renewables are already contributing a significant proportion of generated electricity globally - even in the US it's over 20% versus 8% for nuclear. In many European countries, renewables provide over 30% of the consumed electricity. Renewables are already a big part of electricity generation globally despite the lack of star-trek type batteries. Then the poster turns to politics, suggesting it's just hippies and liberals who have prevented the triumph of nuclear. This is also clearly untrue - the main reason nuclear has all but been abandoned as a source of electricity was decided by the markets - it's just too expensive - without massive government backing nuclear is not economically feasible. Until the 80s, government support was justified because nuclear expertise and materials had military uses but without government support, there hasn't been a single privately financed/build nuclear plant anywhere.

Hammershaft 6y ago
> In many European countries, renewables provide over 30% of the consumed electricity. Renewables are already a big part of electricity generation globally despite the lack of star-trek type batteries. Getting to a fraction of total power demand requires no batteries at all, but that doesn't disprove the OPs point.
pif 6y ago
> In many European countries, renewables provide over 30% of the consumed electricity. That fraction is not very important, unless you can name at least a country who is ready to devote all its renewable enrgy to 30% of their people/services/industries and permanently disconnect them from traditional energy sources.
pif 6y ago
> Until the 80s You mean until Chernobyl?
evilos 6y ago
You can have a big part of your energy generation come from renewables easily (as you pointed out). The hard/impossible part is making renewables the main or only source of power. That requires an insane amount of energy storage capacity, or an amazing electric grid or some combination of these. The US uses 11 Terawatt hours of electric energy every day. Studies project that 80% renewable generation would require 12 hours of battery storage, so 5.5 TWHrs of battery storage. 100% renewable energy needs 3 weeks of storage. Current global production of battery capacity is 300 GWHrs per year. Production is expected to quadruple in 10 years. By these numbers producing enough batteries for the world is not feasible. Also consider that these batteries will need to be recycled and this is a pretty dirty process (currently). Personally, I think the best plan for now is a mix of base load nuclear power(maybe like 20 to 30% of peak demand) and the rest being solar/wind. In the US we'd need to build out thousands of miles of HVDC transmission lines and build lots of battery banks.

konjin 6y ago

Ever noticed how liberals say "do you believe in global warming?" and not "do you understand global warming?" it's not about knowing science, it's about using "science" to defend whatever your group happens to believe. This is not science, this is dogma masquerading as science. For some reason liberals have been allowed to think they are pro-science for the last 20 years when in the most important cases of our time they are not. They need to have it bashed into their skulls that they are not pro-science and that they are responsible for the coming apocalypse.