12 ms·

Yes, but it either needs storage or fossil backup. Otherwise you can't compare wind, even offshore wind, with a reliable source of energy.

KennyBlanken 4y ago
Storage is a solved problem. Pumped hydro has been in use for decades around the world, and battery systems are becoming commonplace as lithium ion battery prices have plunged and alternative battery technologies have matured. Several Iron-flow chemistries are now commercially deployed. I don't understand why every time wind/solar are mentioned on HN, someone feels the need to say "tHe WiND doEsn'T alWAys BloW" while utilities are actively deploying storage, and not just for "when the sun isn't shining", but to help smooth peak usage to avoid transmission upgrades, provide resiliency from infrastructure failure during weather events, and increase flexibility for service/maintenance that doesn't require outages. Also, it's being deployed commercially for resiliency and off-peak rate utilization. It's integrated into an increasing number of EV charge stations because one of the biggest barriers to DCFC system deployment is getting a beefy enough feed from the utility to handle peak usage. Also, it's being deployed at the residential level, for many of the same reasons.
- seanmcdirmid 4y ago
  Where is Japan going to build the reservoirs to support pumped storage? They would literally need to blow up some mountains to do it.
  - andy_ppp 4y ago
    Or build it at the top of said mountains?
    - m4rtink 4y ago
      Well, usually you have many dams in sequence on a river and you can often turn them to pumped hydro by pumping the water from the lower dam back up when you need to store some power. And Japan has a lot of such cascades - even just in Kurobe there are at least 4 major dams one after another.
      - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
        But all that capacity is built out. Japan has about the same as the USA in pumped storage capacity...which is a bit amazing considering Japan is just the size of California.
- xienze 4y ago
  > Storage is a solved problem. And yet, the presumably intelligent people in charge of Japan's energy policy still think nuclear is the way to go. Do you know something they don't?
- tjansen 4y ago
  The issue is the amount of storage required. It depends a lot on the country, but here in Germany I think everybody agrees that we need to store enough energy to power the whole country for at least 2 weeks before we can get rid of fossil fuels. That's a lot of batteries. And currently there's not enough storage for a single hour... In these dimensions, resource availability becomes a limiting factor. Pumped hydro requires a lot of space and geography that many countries can't provide. It may be an option for Norway or Austria, but not for Germany. And even if Germany would buy the planned world production of lithium batteries for the next 10 years, we still wouldn't have enough. The math just doesn't work out for both. Hydrogen looks more realistic, but is not a mature technology at the required scale.
  - nthj 4y ago
    > we need to store enough energy to power the whole country for at least 2 weeks before we can get rid of fossil fuels. Maybe this is self-obvious, but "get rid of" seems to be carrying a lot of weight in that statement. I personally am not offended or concerned by keeping natural gas generators around for decades, even, as insurance for catastrophic disasters, if in practice they're unused 99% of the time because storage infrastructure has reached 24 hour capacity. We reach diminishing returns on increased storage.
  - moloch-hai 4y ago
    There is, in fact, no need to "get rid of fossil fuels", and no plan or desire to do so. So all the remaining claims are irrelevant. NG backup for renewables will remain. More storage mean burning less frequently, which is a pure good. Pumped hydro storage does not, in fact, require "lot of space". Hydro power generation needs a watershed. Pumped hydro can reuse existing hydro infrastructure, but does not depend on it, and does not suffer its failings. Pumped hydro needs only a hill. There will be no need to repeat the cited falsehoods. Finally, a multitude of practical storage methods are being deployed. Batteries are the most expensive, so are only ever used for very short-term storage. NG backup for renewables works and will continue working; storage forestalls need to use it, decreasing opex.
    - panick21_ 4y ago
- belorn 4y ago
  > Pumped hydro has been in use for decades around the world They were used last time in Europe when there were an energy shortage. Almost all was decommissioned quite quickly afterward when they became economical unsustainable. They are generally expensive. They are generally located in places where there already exist a lot of hydro power. They generally need a lot of land and connecting power infrastructure. They generally tend to compete with hydro power. They generally need a lot of subsidies. With energy prices skyrocketing in eu there is some lukewarm interest to restart those old pumped hydro (those that still exist and with existing power infrastructure in place). They are however not a drop in replacement for existing nuclear power plants nor existing natural gas power plants. There is however a energy shortage and so any source might be economical viable if used correctly.
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    > They are generally expensive. For the foreseeable future, electricity storage will stay expensive when you compare it with fast to cycle natural gas generators. This will only change with a carbon tax or after we consume most of the natural gas available on Earth (looks like it would take 2 or 3 decades on the shortest predictions). That applies to any kind of electricity storage. Compared to the alternatives, pumped hydro is currently a cheap highly efficient storage. It gets the best qualities of synthetic fuels (low cost) and batteries (efficiency). But it's not available everywhere. Things are changing fast, and I do expect pumped hydro to not be competitive when we fully deploy storage, but it's currently the best option you will see.
- Herz 4y ago
  1) There are countries that simply cannot rely on hydropower. 2) I am Italian, so I will talk about Italy. The Italian plan to get to 100% renewable requires 70x the current world production of lithium. 3) Rare earth mining for batteries, panels and wind turbines has a non-negligible impact. 4) You are implicitly stating that the cost of wind power is not that, but 3/4x higher, since you also need storage, and therefore it is much more expensive than nuclear the "real" cost. 5) You are talking about distributing storage over the electrical infrastructure. So you're talking about completely redoing existing grids. Other additional costs. In short, the reality of the facts is very different from saying "renewables are cheap."
- kergonath 4y ago
  > Storage is a solved problem. Lol no, it really isn’t. > Pumped hydro has been in use for decades around the world, Pumped hydro works if you have mountains, valleys you can flood, and dams. It works great in the Alps; good luck doing that in the UK or in the Netherlands. > battery systems are becoming commonplace as lithium ion battery prices have plunged They are nowhere near the right scale. Bear in mind, in Europe they’d need to store energy over several weeks or months. The continent is prone to winter anti cyclonic conditions that go on for weeks, with no wind and no sun light. It’s quite different from, say, most of Australia. > alternative battery technologies have matured I’d like to know which one, because as far as I know none of the alternative are anywhere near maturity. Progress is being made, but you’re overselling it. > Several Iron-flow chemistries are now commercially deployed. These are no silver bullets and have several drawbacks, including the “flow” bit, which requires pumps and valves. Efficiency is also not that great. There are sulphides, lithium-air, and Na-ion designs that are more promising. But again, none of that is mature, or even really produced at scale. > I don't understand why every time wind/solar are mentioned on HN, someone feels the need to say "tHe WiND doEsn'T alWAys BloW" while utilities are actively deploying storage, and not just for "when the sun isn't shining", but to help smooth peak usage to avoid transmission upgrades, provide resiliency from infrastructure failure during weather events, and increase flexibility for service/maintenance that doesn't require outages. It’s the counterpoint of all these “lol renewables all the way” posts that crop up any time we discuss energy policy. Most people would say that there are very good use cases for renewables. But they won’t be enough. If you read analyses at the grid level (some of that is in the IPCC reports), constant base production is very much required, otherwise you need to vastly overbuild and your grid has one huge point of failure (yes, freak meteorological events do happen).
  - donny2018 4y ago
    Pumped hydro also works if you have water at all, which my country doesn’t. So, some kind of new molten-salt reactor which doesn’t need water for cooling and can be built in the desert could work very well for us.
  - peterfirefly 4y ago
    Just a minor nit -- and some links for those who might not know where to find them. I of course agree with you. > Pumped hydro works if you have mountains, valleys you can flood, and dams. It works great in the Alps; good luck doing that in the UK or in the Netherlands. It works in Wales and Scotland -- but not in England where it is needed the most. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruachan_Power_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruachan_Power_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectricity_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectricity_in_the_United... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroelectric_power_stations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroel...
- jonnycomputer 4y ago
  I do think hydrogen is the answer, and I think it will be economical. Not just for energy, but for ammonia for fertilizer.
  - SyzygistSix 4y ago
    Hydrogen is part of the answer, for steel and perhaps concrete manufacturing. And also to fuel container ships, in the form of ammonia. But as a storage medium it is not very efficient. At least not now.
    - moloch-hai 4y ago
      Round-trip efficiency is not very important for a backup storage medium when the marginal cost to produce is zero. Other considerations drive choices, then, e.g. capex, transportability, usefulness for other processes.
      - _hypx 4y ago
        And once you realize that nearly all renewable energy production has a marginal cost of zero, then it quickly becomes the overwhelmingly best idea for energy storage.
        SyzygistSix 4y ago
        The infrastructure needed for hydrogen production and storage is far, far, from zero.
        moloch-hai 4y ago
        Yet, the marginal cost of producing hydrogen using that infrastructure is zero: the only inputs are water and energy, and the marginal cost of that energy is zero.
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    Will be fantastic when we have all those hydrogen production plants who only run with 30% utilization because they only make sense when you massively overproduce renewables.
- concordDance 4y ago
  > Storage is a solved problem Why do people just assert things rather than spending five minutes actually looking up some numbers doing arithmetic? Storage systems and theirs costs, discharge rates, cycle endurance, etc: https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2019/07/f65/Storage%20Cost%20and%20Performance%20Characterization%20Report_Final.pdf https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2019/07/f65/Stora... What the wind power production rate over time looks like for a country: https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ Then you can look up country power consumption and wind cost per KWh and half life. Then it's just some arithmetic. You're not helpless consumers of data, you CAN look this up and figure it out. To save you some trouble, the bottom line is that for countries like the UK pure renewables would triple electricity costs. Is that an acceptable price? Maybe.
  - moloch-hai 4y ago
    Nobody expects, demands, or plans "UK pure renewables". So all of the above, conditioned on it, is specious. Renewables are the cheapest power generation the world has ever seen, by a large and growing margin. Storage in many practical forms is being deployed. Everything that has always worked still works, and will be abandoned only when it is not needed anymore.

KennyBlanken 4y ago

Storage is a solved problem. Pumped hydro has been in use for decades around the world, and battery systems are becoming commonplace as lithium ion battery prices have plunged and alternative battery technologies have matured. Several Iron-flow chemistries are now commercially deployed. I don't understand why every time wind/solar are mentioned on HN, someone feels the need to say "tHe WiND doEsn'T alWAys BloW" while utilities are actively deploying storage, and not just for "when the sun isn't shining", but to help smooth peak usage to avoid transmission upgrades, provide resiliency from infrastructure failure during weather events, and increase flexibility for service/maintenance that doesn't require outages. Also, it's being deployed commercially for resiliency and off-peak rate utilization. It's integrated into an increasing number of EV charge stations because one of the biggest barriers to DCFC system deployment is getting a beefy enough feed from the utility to handle peak usage. Also, it's being deployed at the residential level, for many of the same reasons.

seanmcdirmid 4y ago
Where is Japan going to build the reservoirs to support pumped storage? They would literally need to blow up some mountains to do it.
- andy_ppp 4y ago
  Or build it at the top of said mountains?
  - m4rtink 4y ago
    Well, usually you have many dams in sequence on a river and you can often turn them to pumped hydro by pumping the water from the lower dam back up when you need to store some power. And Japan has a lot of such cascades - even just in Kurobe there are at least 4 major dams one after another.
    - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
      But all that capacity is built out. Japan has about the same as the USA in pumped storage capacity...which is a bit amazing considering Japan is just the size of California.
xienze 4y ago
> Storage is a solved problem. And yet, the presumably intelligent people in charge of Japan's energy policy still think nuclear is the way to go. Do you know something they don't?
tjansen 4y ago
The issue is the amount of storage required. It depends a lot on the country, but here in Germany I think everybody agrees that we need to store enough energy to power the whole country for at least 2 weeks before we can get rid of fossil fuels. That's a lot of batteries. And currently there's not enough storage for a single hour... In these dimensions, resource availability becomes a limiting factor. Pumped hydro requires a lot of space and geography that many countries can't provide. It may be an option for Norway or Austria, but not for Germany. And even if Germany would buy the planned world production of lithium batteries for the next 10 years, we still wouldn't have enough. The math just doesn't work out for both. Hydrogen looks more realistic, but is not a mature technology at the required scale.
- nthj 4y ago
  > we need to store enough energy to power the whole country for at least 2 weeks before we can get rid of fossil fuels. Maybe this is self-obvious, but "get rid of" seems to be carrying a lot of weight in that statement. I personally am not offended or concerned by keeping natural gas generators around for decades, even, as insurance for catastrophic disasters, if in practice they're unused 99% of the time because storage infrastructure has reached 24 hour capacity. We reach diminishing returns on increased storage.
- moloch-hai 4y ago
  There is, in fact, no need to "get rid of fossil fuels", and no plan or desire to do so. So all the remaining claims are irrelevant. NG backup for renewables will remain. More storage mean burning less frequently, which is a pure good. Pumped hydro storage does not, in fact, require "lot of space". Hydro power generation needs a watershed. Pumped hydro can reuse existing hydro infrastructure, but does not depend on it, and does not suffer its failings. Pumped hydro needs only a hill. There will be no need to repeat the cited falsehoods. Finally, a multitude of practical storage methods are being deployed. Batteries are the most expensive, so are only ever used for very short-term storage. NG backup for renewables works and will continue working; storage forestalls need to use it, decreasing opex.
  - panick21_ 4y ago
belorn 4y ago
> Pumped hydro has been in use for decades around the world They were used last time in Europe when there were an energy shortage. Almost all was decommissioned quite quickly afterward when they became economical unsustainable. They are generally expensive. They are generally located in places where there already exist a lot of hydro power. They generally need a lot of land and connecting power infrastructure. They generally tend to compete with hydro power. They generally need a lot of subsidies. With energy prices skyrocketing in eu there is some lukewarm interest to restart those old pumped hydro (those that still exist and with existing power infrastructure in place). They are however not a drop in replacement for existing nuclear power plants nor existing natural gas power plants. There is however a energy shortage and so any source might be economical viable if used correctly.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  > They are generally expensive. For the foreseeable future, electricity storage will stay expensive when you compare it with fast to cycle natural gas generators. This will only change with a carbon tax or after we consume most of the natural gas available on Earth (looks like it would take 2 or 3 decades on the shortest predictions). That applies to any kind of electricity storage. Compared to the alternatives, pumped hydro is currently a cheap highly efficient storage. It gets the best qualities of synthetic fuels (low cost) and batteries (efficiency). But it's not available everywhere. Things are changing fast, and I do expect pumped hydro to not be competitive when we fully deploy storage, but it's currently the best option you will see.
Herz 4y ago
1) There are countries that simply cannot rely on hydropower. 2) I am Italian, so I will talk about Italy. The Italian plan to get to 100% renewable requires 70x the current world production of lithium. 3) Rare earth mining for batteries, panels and wind turbines has a non-negligible impact. 4) You are implicitly stating that the cost of wind power is not that, but 3/4x higher, since you also need storage, and therefore it is much more expensive than nuclear the "real" cost. 5) You are talking about distributing storage over the electrical infrastructure. So you're talking about completely redoing existing grids. Other additional costs. In short, the reality of the facts is very different from saying "renewables are cheap."
kergonath 4y ago
> Storage is a solved problem. Lol no, it really isn’t. > Pumped hydro has been in use for decades around the world, Pumped hydro works if you have mountains, valleys you can flood, and dams. It works great in the Alps; good luck doing that in the UK or in the Netherlands. > battery systems are becoming commonplace as lithium ion battery prices have plunged They are nowhere near the right scale. Bear in mind, in Europe they’d need to store energy over several weeks or months. The continent is prone to winter anti cyclonic conditions that go on for weeks, with no wind and no sun light. It’s quite different from, say, most of Australia. > alternative battery technologies have matured I’d like to know which one, because as far as I know none of the alternative are anywhere near maturity. Progress is being made, but you’re overselling it. > Several Iron-flow chemistries are now commercially deployed. These are no silver bullets and have several drawbacks, including the “flow” bit, which requires pumps and valves. Efficiency is also not that great. There are sulphides, lithium-air, and Na-ion designs that are more promising. But again, none of that is mature, or even really produced at scale. > I don't understand why every time wind/solar are mentioned on HN, someone feels the need to say "tHe WiND doEsn'T alWAys BloW" while utilities are actively deploying storage, and not just for "when the sun isn't shining", but to help smooth peak usage to avoid transmission upgrades, provide resiliency from infrastructure failure during weather events, and increase flexibility for service/maintenance that doesn't require outages. It’s the counterpoint of all these “lol renewables all the way” posts that crop up any time we discuss energy policy. Most people would say that there are very good use cases for renewables. But they won’t be enough. If you read analyses at the grid level (some of that is in the IPCC reports), constant base production is very much required, otherwise you need to vastly overbuild and your grid has one huge point of failure (yes, freak meteorological events do happen).
- donny2018 4y ago
  Pumped hydro also works if you have water at all, which my country doesn’t. So, some kind of new molten-salt reactor which doesn’t need water for cooling and can be built in the desert could work very well for us.
- peterfirefly 4y ago
  Just a minor nit -- and some links for those who might not know where to find them. I of course agree with you. > Pumped hydro works if you have mountains, valleys you can flood, and dams. It works great in the Alps; good luck doing that in the UK or in the Netherlands. It works in Wales and Scotland -- but not in England where it is needed the most. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruachan_Power_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruachan_Power_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectricity_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectricity_in_the_United... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroelectric_power_stations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroel...
jonnycomputer 4y ago
I do think hydrogen is the answer, and I think it will be economical. Not just for energy, but for ammonia for fertilizer.
- SyzygistSix 4y ago
  Hydrogen is part of the answer, for steel and perhaps concrete manufacturing. And also to fuel container ships, in the form of ammonia. But as a storage medium it is not very efficient. At least not now.
  - moloch-hai 4y ago
    Round-trip efficiency is not very important for a backup storage medium when the marginal cost to produce is zero. Other considerations drive choices, then, e.g. capex, transportability, usefulness for other processes.
    - _hypx 4y ago
      And once you realize that nearly all renewable energy production has a marginal cost of zero, then it quickly becomes the overwhelmingly best idea for energy storage.
      - SyzygistSix 4y ago
        The infrastructure needed for hydrogen production and storage is far, far, from zero.
        moloch-hai 4y ago
        Yet, the marginal cost of producing hydrogen using that infrastructure is zero: the only inputs are water and energy, and the marginal cost of that energy is zero.
- panick21_ 4y ago
  Will be fantastic when we have all those hydrogen production plants who only run with 30% utilization because they only make sense when you massively overproduce renewables.
concordDance 4y ago
> Storage is a solved problem Why do people just assert things rather than spending five minutes actually looking up some numbers doing arithmetic? Storage systems and theirs costs, discharge rates, cycle endurance, etc: https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2019/07/f65/Storage%20Cost%20and%20Performance%20Characterization%20Report_Final.pdf https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2019/07/f65/Stora... What the wind power production rate over time looks like for a country: https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ Then you can look up country power consumption and wind cost per KWh and half life. Then it's just some arithmetic. You're not helpless consumers of data, you CAN look this up and figure it out. To save you some trouble, the bottom line is that for countries like the UK pure renewables would triple electricity costs. Is that an acceptable price? Maybe.
- moloch-hai 4y ago
  Nobody expects, demands, or plans "UK pure renewables". So all of the above, conditioned on it, is specious. Renewables are the cheapest power generation the world has ever seen, by a large and growing margin. Storage in many practical forms is being deployed. Everything that has always worked still works, and will be abandoned only when it is not needed anymore.