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I get a little frustrated that all of the people who crapped all over solar power can now simply sit there quietly as it becomes a major component of electricit

I get a little frustrated that all of the people who crapped all over solar power can now simply sit there quietly as it becomes a major component of electricity generation and pay no price for spreading anti-solar propaganda at such a historically critical juncture. I always found it particularly grotesque coming from the HN crowd, where an audience of mostly engineers and entrepreneurs seemed to have no problem finding impossible problems that could never be solved and would therefore render solar useless on a large scale. That profound lack of imagination could almost lead one to conclude that the naysayers had other axes to grind, and maybe it wasn't purely about clearing technical hurdles.

rich_sasha 3y ago
Are we any closer to solving seasonal storage at high latitudes? I guess solar is taking the slack out of marginal power production, but relies on fossil fuels or nuclear to fill the gaps. My personal gripe with renewables is that, except for some geographies, it is unlikely we can run the whole economy on renewables due to storage issues, at which point you can't make any more progress with renewables. You would then need nuclear to decarbonize further, by which point you may just as well have built nuclear in the first place.
vasco 3y ago
My imagination still prefers nuclear! I don't mind solar projects but think it's a big mistake to not invest in nuclear.
- pydry 3y ago
  Civilian nuclear power help share costs with the nuclear military industrial complex (e.g. Russia, France, UK, USA) and it's useful for countries that have a clear and pressing desire to be able to develop a nuclear bomb in a hurry (Sweden, South Korea, Japan), but without those caveats there isn't much point to it which is why nobody else builds it. Its LCOE is 5x that of solar and between 1.5x-3x more expensive than solar/wind paired with just about all viable forms of green large scale storage (hydrogen, batteries, pumped storage (studies prove that unlike the river dams it is often confused with, geography for pumped storage is plentiful)). Meanwhile tariffs like https://octopus.energy/agile/ https://octopus.energy/agile/ reduces the need for that storage for easily shiftable demand sources like heaters/electric car batteries [edit in response to coldpie]. Pairing it with non-green gas is cheaper still, even in spite of the war. If up-front cost is your only concern, gas+solar+wind wins on all fronts. It also takes ~20 years to build a nuclear plant, while new solar capacity can start taking meaty chunks out of current gas usage after 12 months. Given that western countries are between 40-60% gas powered these days and we don't have 20 years to avoid climate catastrophe, it leaves only two obvious choices of power source to decarbonize quickly - solar + wind.
  - tigroferoce 3y ago
    Cost and time are a big part, but not the only part. A real question is whether we can do with REN alone or not. If we can, good, let’s do it. If we can’t, then we must find something else, regardless of costs. And by “do it” I mean electrify as much as possible (transports, heating, industries where possible) and compensate where we can’t (airplane, agriculture, cement). Are we positive that we can make it? And what happens if we can’t? Should plan for the unhappy scenario too?
  - michael1999 3y ago
    That was always the killer for CANDU. If industry has to carry the whole cost of research, education, regulation, and training operators, our market is too small to support it. And the big buyers all have their own (weapon program adjacent) programs. We might have a renaissance with SMRs, but we’ll be contributors, not independents.
  - coldpie 3y ago
    > paired with just about all viable forms of green large scale storage (hydrogen, batteries, pumped storage). I'm skeptical that these can actually scale to the required level to provide baseload when renewables are unavailable. Don't forget to include EVs and electric heating, which we don't have in massive quantities today but will need to have in short order. (To be ultra-clear: I would never argue against more renewable deployments. Yes, more renewables, always more. But I think not building nuclear, right now, is a big mistake.)
    - pfdietz 3y ago
      Why are you skeptical? A blanket statement without an argument to back it up is not addressable or useful.
      - coldpie 3y ago
        Because they've never been deployed at the scale we're talking about. They're unproven. Hydrogen is inefficient to make and hard to store safely; current battery tech isn't efficient enough and has resource limitations; pumped hydro requires certain relatively rare combinations of geographic properties. Are those solvable problems? Probably, hopefully, some day. Meanwhile, nuclear works right now and is well understood.
- chinathrow 3y ago
  Even with current lead times?
  - ftth_finland 3y ago
    If we start building nuclear now, in a number of years we we have nuclear power plants. If we wait the same number of years, we might have some form of viable long term storage. Or not.
    - mikeyouse 3y ago
      The problem with nuclear is and has always been the opportunity cost. If you have $15 billion today -- you could tie it up for a decade and you might get a working 1GW reactor in 10 years (though probably more like 15). Or you could spend $1 billion/year and end up with probably 15GW of utility solar in the same time frame? Even at a 20% capacity factor instead of a 95% one, you'd be making far more money from Day 1 with solar and since we're not remotely at the saturation point of renewables, every watt generated would still be useful. The right answer to whatever qualms people have about time-of-use / duck curves would be to invest more like $800M/year in generation and $200M/year in storage -- but still -- literal multiples of energy produced with almost zero ongoing costs.
      - ftth_finland 3y ago
        > The problem with nuclear is and has always been the opportunity cost. What opportunity cost? What else are you going to spend the money on that gives you non-polluting 24/7 power output rain or shine? > If you have $15 billion today -- you could tie it up for a decade and you might get a working 1GW reactor in 10 years (though probably more like 15). The best time to build a nuclear power plant was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. What we need is to build nuclear power at scale. Doing the same thing repeatedly for years in bound to bring both the construction time and cost down. > Or you could spend $1 billion/year and end up with probably 15GW of utility solar in the same time frame? What use is 15GW of solar in northern climes when you cannot use it when you need it and you cannot store it? In Finland solar has no output three months of the year and an additional two months of marginal output. Additional we need power 24/7, especially in winter. > Even at a 20% capacity factor instead of a 95% one, you'd be making far more money from Day 1 with solar and since we're not remotely at the saturation point of renewables, every watt generated would still be useful. I must confess I am unsure how the long term economics of renewables will work out. Around here renewables are pushing prices into the negative and increasing volatility. As a funny aside, 15 GW is the peak power usage in Finland. Adding that much generation capacity would totally saturate the market. > The right answer to whatever qualms people have about time-of-use / duck curves would be to invest more like $800M/year in generation and $200M/year in storage -- but still -- literal multiples of energy produced with almost zero ongoing costs. How many GWh of storage can you get for $200M? My guess is far from enough. We need days at a minimum, weeks for preference. 4 hours is nowhere enough.
- grej 3y ago
  I think solar makes sense in all of the places that otherwise are unused. Roofs and the shades of car parks, for example. But I am not a fan of giant fields of solar panels. Or worse, taking arable land and covering it with solar panels. Nuclear (smallest geographic footprint and smallest overall environmental impact) + solar & wind is the way forward.
  - CyberDildonics 3y ago
    But I am not a fan of giant fields of solar panels. Or worse, taking arable land and covering it with solar panels. Why are there any negatives here? A field of solar panels is far more valuable than a field growing corn to feed to cows. Nuclear (smallest geographic footprint This doesn't matter, there is no shortage of land. People living in high rises in the center of big cities think there is, but once someone looks at a map they see how much land is actually out there. smallest overall environmental impact According to what metric? You can't put a nuclear plant anywhere, you have to be able to cool it.
    - kbar13 3y ago
      there are always environmental impacts to land when we deprive it of sunlight, which is why picking the low hanging fruit of covering man-made structures with panels would be preferable over large fields
      - CyberDildonics 3y ago
        Trees deprive land of sunlight, that seems to work out fine. Do you have any actual information or data?
      - pfdietz 3y ago
        Since there are environmental impacts of land use, it seems we should maximize the return from each unit of land, to minimize the impact per unit of benefit. Now, compare the value returned by an acre growing feed grain, to an acre collecting solar energy via PV. The latter has enormously higher return. The argument you are making is not an argument against freestanding PV, it's an argument against agriculture. And yet, it is selectively applied to PV.
- ianai 3y ago
  My state proposed a grid battery solution that would have provided power for the entire state for up to 1-2 days IIRC. They didn’t approve it, but the budget wasn’t astronomical. I honestly wonder if the worry about off hours use is a little overblown. Infrastructure has a history of both being expensive up front and funded. Imagine if the US didn’t have highways and trying to explain all the impacts to the GDP that modern highways make. The price would almost seem trivial compared to the trillions per year of GDP that goes over asphalt.
  - ftth_finland 3y ago
    Where can I find more information about this? I can find very little information about long term storage, not that 1-2 days is much. Most seem to think 4 hours qualifies as storage.
    - pydry 3y ago
      This model thinks that 5 hours gets us to 97%: https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-grid-is-well-within-reach-and-with-little-storage/ https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g... 5 hours is pretty doable with batteries and pumped storage. It's a lot and very expensive but not an impossible amount and there aren't any cheaper/quicker alternatives that I'm aware of. I think Australia will be almost half way to 5 hours already once Snowy 2 is finished. That's just one pumped storage plant & studies show that the geography to build more is plentiful. That last 3% can probably be eventually provided with via hydrogen, which, unlike the other two, is inefficient to roundtrip (~45%) but it lets you store large amounts of power for long durations easily.
      - pfdietz 3y ago
        Glad to hear someone else beating the hydrogen (or some e-fuel) drum for that last few percent.
        0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
        I do not understand why there is not more focus on fuel synthesis. If electricity becomes “free” for hours a day, even crummy roundtrip efficiency seems like a great option to soak up extra capacity and get long term (seasonal?) storage.
- r00fus 3y ago
  For baseload power I agree, but looking at Zaporizhzhia in Ukraine, it's hard not to see the downsides of nuclear: it's vulnerable to water/cooling issues and can be weaponized by terrorists or an invading army. Solar has none of these issues, and is resilient/decentralized as well.
  - the8472 3y ago
    > and can be weaponized by terrorists or an invading army. These risks seem vastly overstated for a large fraction of the world. That such events happen occasionally does not mean the entire world needs to be on a war footing all the time. That would be incredibly wasteful. > it's vulnerable to water/cooling issues Yeah that seems more like an issue but may be solvable by using sea water for cooling?
    - r00fus 3y ago
      > These risks seem vastly overstated for a large fraction of the world. That such events happen occasionally does not mean the entire world needs to be on a war footing all the time. That would be incredibly wasteful. That’s part of the problem. It’s an asymmetric risk/cost issue. The attackers only need to get it right once, you need to defend your installation constantly. Security for nuclear power stations already increase the upkeep cost considerably.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - xyzzyz 3y ago
    Same can be said about cities: they are vulnerable to water issues (if a city loses access to water, it’s a major disaster), and military can weaponize them as fortification. Does it mean that we shouldn’t build cities? No, obviously not, that’s silly: it just means that you have to make sure water is flowing, and that military invasions are hugely destructive.
    - bwb 3y ago
      That isn't a good analogy. Cities have multiple water sources, and it is a very complex system. Not to mention we have special trucks and responses when that happens (at least in the USA). Nuclear has some problems.
- prai1SE 3y ago
  I‘m also a fan of nuclear but do you think as a global economy we can collectively invest into multiple huge industries at the same time which aim to solve the same issue (too-cheap-to-meter & renewable power, deployed asap to avoid runaway climate change)? What I mean is that wind + PV are on a roll at the moment. This has turned into a huge and hungry global industry which has a lot of momentum (people wanting to work there, technical readiness, investors ready to supply capital, public acceptance, pretty decent public opinion on the industry). From personal experience, I used the live in Munich where one of the main industry fairs (Intersolar) takes place, and it‘s a huge and ever growing event. So even though I like nuclear and agree that the currently running reactors should stay online as long as possible, I appreciate that getting the nuclear power industry to the same fitness level as the solar industry would take a long time (which we don‘t have) hence me preferring solar. This is a zero-sum mindset, which I believe applies here.
- mastax 3y ago
  Nuclear has been and is being invested in. Governments fund a huge amount of nuclear R&D and also often heavily subsidize plant construction. When utilities crunch the numbers to decide what to invest in building, they overwhelmingly don't choose nuclear. And yes, they are certainly taking into account intermittency, "base load" whatever you want to call it. There are arguments to be made that decision-makers at utilities aren't taking into account certain factors, for example in deregulated markets like Texas where reliability has perhaps been under-rewarded by the market design. But I think one should be especially skeptical about arguments posted by laymen versus the experts who are actually putting their money where their mouth is.
BugsJustFindMe 3y ago
> I always found it particularly grotesque coming from the HN crowd, where an audience of mostly engineers and entrepreneurs seemed to have no problem finding impossible problems that could never be solved and would therefore render solar useless on a large scale. I guess your lesson here is that most people who call themselves engineers aren't by any meaningful definition. Don't expect individual creativity from a business title that usually amounts to very little creative problem solving.
- UberFly 3y ago
  Your crapping on engineers blast-radius is too broad here.
  - cinntaile 3y ago
    He's probably right that plenty engineers let politics or opinions get in the way of data, engineers are only human after all.
  - BugsJustFindMe 3y ago
    After several decades of personal cross-industries experience across many fields and in many places, by percentage I bet it's extremely not.
- raverbashing 3y ago
  Yeah. Maybe the engineers of yore (but there are some thorny stories from some SV engineers in the 70's), when to build something you really needed solid technical knowledge But nowadays whoever knows how to put together a basic webpage in ~~PHP~~ React calls themselves an "engineer" and begins having grandiose ideas No wonder they got bamboozled by Theranos, uBeam, etc
oittaa 3y ago
Just take a look at any recent thread about electric vehicles and especially about Tesla. Same luddites talking about how everybody needs to drive 1000km without stopping every day.
noughtme 3y ago
> But the fanfare surrounding the phasing-out of coal and oil needs to be tempered with some realism… grid instability… investment in fossil fuel supply will rise by more than six percent… The article itself craps on solar.
- ftth_finland 3y ago
  How is this crapping on solar?
  - ZeroGravitas 3y ago
    There's a paragraph about 2/3rds down that rolls out all the usual BS, and links to an article, by the same author, suggesting we need to slow down renewable rollout as it is "destabilising the grid".
    - not_a_shill 3y ago
      Can you please respond to this? I just want to make sure misinformation isn't being spread. >Just curious because this question is always posed when HN disagrees with something. Are the recent climate events actually statistically significant?
      - ZeroGravitas 3y ago
        Can you clarify what you are asking? If you mean: can we prove that man-made climate change is a factor in making some recent weather events (hurricanes, floods, wildfires, droughts etc.) worse, then yes: https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-how-climate-change-affects-extreme-weather-around-the-world/ https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-how-climate-change-affect...
        not_a_shill 3y ago
        The context is I was responding to this post you made >(2021) And I'm not sure if it's posted by someone who still agrees with that conclusion or someone who think things have moved fast enough in the last couple of years to make it seem silly in retrospect. So I guess what I really want to know is: 1) what changed within the last two years that would cause an accelerating amount of climate change 2) how confident are we in that answer 3) does that answer provide any predictive power going forward. Ie, should we expect the rate of change to keep increasing or hold steady? I don't need a link to any studies, I'll take your word for it. Edit: thanks for the response
vm 3y ago
This happens with many (all?) topics, not only solar. Keep it in mind as you read media...
adaml_623 3y ago
"All the people"... Do you not realise it's different groups. And you just think it's the "HN crowd"
ZeroGravitas 3y ago
If the past trend in climate change denial is any guide, they'll just continue to crap on it, even as they are repeatedly proved dramatically wrong. Though some recent attempts to pivot to "we aren't rolling out renewables fast enough because of environmentalists" suggest a few rats jumping from the sinking ship as reality bites hard.
- prai1SE 3y ago
  Having been somewhat active in my uni days in „environmentalists“ orgs (eg Greenpeace), I think being blamed by everybody is part of the game as an activist. The reward is knowing that one has had an impact in pushing the needle a tiny bit. And now it slowly emerges that the decades of activism have started to pay off now that we see more amd more stats about surging PV/Wind deployment and them providing already significant chunks of electricity needs in Europe (where I‘m from) and globally.
jackmott42 3y ago
I have at times tried to explain realistic visions of what it takes for renewables to become, say, 75% of the grid and people have taken it as crapping on solar, because I describe how it will require trillion dollar scale storage solutions. But fossil fuels also require trillion dollar scale extraction solutions, so I don't see it as crapping on solar, it won't be easy but we will do it, I hope!
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
  $1T is really not that much money for the US. Energy is 4.8% of US GDP, about ~$1T. So we already have $1T to spend on energy... It's just a matter of how we spend it. This is just what things cost when you've got 335M people and most of them are relatively rich from a global perspective.
  - jackmott42 3y ago
    Right, but we don't yet see this projects happening, and it might be time that they start happening. But how to talk people into that, when half of the USA thinks climate change is a liberal scam, I don't know.
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    The world will spend upwards of $1Q on energy in the next century.
- megaman821 3y ago
  How can you accurately project costs of grid-scale store 1 or 2 decades into the future? It is an industry that is just starting out and projected to grow quite large. Profits and manufacturing labor account for greater than 50% of the battery costs now, so there is a good bit of room for prices to fall as manufacturing ramps up and the market becomes more competitive.
  - jackmott42 3y ago
    You can't, it was an order of magnitude napkin math calculation I did based on the cost of pump back hydro dams in china and the amount of energy storage you would need. It is going to be in the trillions barring some radical revolution in storage that is unlikely given our breadth of knowledge of physics at this point. A lot of people think that Tesla Megapacks here and there are enough but those cover interruptions on the scale of minutes, not hours or days.
thx-2718 3y ago
I've observed the same. However I've also found, at least older engineers, often to be oddly conservative despite a huge overlap with being Star Trek fans. Makes no sense. Maybe it's like the brain gets really efficient at solving problems in a specific way that it gets harder to see problems from another angle. Regardless it's a really exciting time to be an engineer.
- irrational 3y ago
  I don’t understand the Star Trek reference. Can you elaborate?
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > I don’t understand the Star Trek reference. Can you elaborate Not OP, but Star Trek posits a post-scarcity economy and progressive values. (It also presents a militarized society.)
    - thx-2718 3y ago
      What would you say it's militarized? I mean, the command structure of Star Fleet mirrors the military, but as far I know the the mirror universe is the 'militarized' society.
      - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
        > the command structure of Star Fleet mirrors the military This. For someone with a longing for a culture that values duty, and with it, a sense of place and responsibility, a community with hierarchy, et cetera, Star Trek delivers. Today, those elements largely live within conservative America.
        thx-2718 3y ago
        It is kind of interesting which parts of Roddenberry's creation people focus the most on. iirc He wanted to promote egalitarian values whilst portraying the efficiencies and comradery of a uniform service.
oh_sigh 3y ago
Well, anyone who believed in solar could have invested in solar-related technologies, and anyone who didn't believe in solar probably wouldn't invest. So, if you put your money where your mouth is(/was), you could be reaping the benefits. FSLR is +260% and SEDG is +440% over 5 years. Plus, something far more important than money, is that any time a solar-denier talks about anything forward looking in the future, you can rub their face in the fact that they mispredicted solar so badly.
- standardUser 3y ago
  Meh, there's some truth there, but we all know it's more complicated than just "buy solar stock -> make lots of money". An industry can BOOM while perfectly rational investors lose a buttload of money because the particular companies/etfs they picked weren't the ones that benefited from the boom.
constantcrying 3y ago
Are there any news in regards to recycling or operation length? Solar obviously "works" if it has the surrounding infrastructure, like storage and weather. Hopefully green energy subsidies can end soon.
- jackmott42 3y ago
  Hopefully fossil fuel subsidy ends before green ones do, they are much more expensive.
  - constantcrying 3y ago
    Absolutely, use them for nuclear.
    - mikeyouse 3y ago
      Nuclear already sees a massive amount of subsidies, it's not clear that more would move the needle in any useful way.
      - constantcrying 3y ago
        Where I live there are no subsidies for nuclear, as the country is far too developed for that technology and now relies on coal, together with some seasonal sun and wind.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  The worst case of all renewable equipment being landfilled would be acceptable. Any recycling would just be icing on the cake. Also, the materials going into renewable infrastructure powering society will be small compared to materials going into society as a whole. If recycling can be done on the latter, it could be done on the former. If it can't be done on the latter, the former wouldn't matter. And the recycling on general materials is a problem that comes up even in a nuclear-powered society.
  - 3y ago

rich_sasha 3y ago

Are we any closer to solving seasonal storage at high latitudes? I guess solar is taking the slack out of marginal power production, but relies on fossil fuels or nuclear to fill the gaps. My personal gripe with renewables is that, except for some geographies, it is unlikely we can run the whole economy on renewables due to storage issues, at which point you can't make any more progress with renewables. You would then need nuclear to decarbonize further, by which point you may just as well have built nuclear in the first place.

vasco 3y ago

My imagination still prefers nuclear! I don't mind solar projects but think it's a big mistake to not invest in nuclear.

pydry 3y ago
Civilian nuclear power help share costs with the nuclear military industrial complex (e.g. Russia, France, UK, USA) and it's useful for countries that have a clear and pressing desire to be able to develop a nuclear bomb in a hurry (Sweden, South Korea, Japan), but without those caveats there isn't much point to it which is why nobody else builds it. Its LCOE is 5x that of solar and between 1.5x-3x more expensive than solar/wind paired with just about all viable forms of green large scale storage (hydrogen, batteries, pumped storage (studies prove that unlike the river dams it is often confused with, geography for pumped storage is plentiful)). Meanwhile tariffs like https://octopus.energy/agile/ https://octopus.energy/agile/ reduces the need for that storage for easily shiftable demand sources like heaters/electric car batteries [edit in response to coldpie]. Pairing it with non-green gas is cheaper still, even in spite of the war. If up-front cost is your only concern, gas+solar+wind wins on all fronts. It also takes ~20 years to build a nuclear plant, while new solar capacity can start taking meaty chunks out of current gas usage after 12 months. Given that western countries are between 40-60% gas powered these days and we don't have 20 years to avoid climate catastrophe, it leaves only two obvious choices of power source to decarbonize quickly - solar + wind.
- tigroferoce 3y ago
  Cost and time are a big part, but not the only part. A real question is whether we can do with REN alone or not. If we can, good, let’s do it. If we can’t, then we must find something else, regardless of costs. And by “do it” I mean electrify as much as possible (transports, heating, industries where possible) and compensate where we can’t (airplane, agriculture, cement). Are we positive that we can make it? And what happens if we can’t? Should plan for the unhappy scenario too?
- michael1999 3y ago
  That was always the killer for CANDU. If industry has to carry the whole cost of research, education, regulation, and training operators, our market is too small to support it. And the big buyers all have their own (weapon program adjacent) programs. We might have a renaissance with SMRs, but we’ll be contributors, not independents.
- coldpie 3y ago
  > paired with just about all viable forms of green large scale storage (hydrogen, batteries, pumped storage). I'm skeptical that these can actually scale to the required level to provide baseload when renewables are unavailable. Don't forget to include EVs and electric heating, which we don't have in massive quantities today but will need to have in short order. (To be ultra-clear: I would never argue against more renewable deployments. Yes, more renewables, always more. But I think not building nuclear, right now, is a big mistake.)
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    Why are you skeptical? A blanket statement without an argument to back it up is not addressable or useful.
    - coldpie 3y ago
      Because they've never been deployed at the scale we're talking about. They're unproven. Hydrogen is inefficient to make and hard to store safely; current battery tech isn't efficient enough and has resource limitations; pumped hydro requires certain relatively rare combinations of geographic properties. Are those solvable problems? Probably, hopefully, some day. Meanwhile, nuclear works right now and is well understood.
chinathrow 3y ago
Even with current lead times?
- ftth_finland 3y ago
  If we start building nuclear now, in a number of years we we have nuclear power plants. If we wait the same number of years, we might have some form of viable long term storage. Or not.
  - mikeyouse 3y ago
    The problem with nuclear is and has always been the opportunity cost. If you have $15 billion today -- you could tie it up for a decade and you might get a working 1GW reactor in 10 years (though probably more like 15). Or you could spend $1 billion/year and end up with probably 15GW of utility solar in the same time frame? Even at a 20% capacity factor instead of a 95% one, you'd be making far more money from Day 1 with solar and since we're not remotely at the saturation point of renewables, every watt generated would still be useful. The right answer to whatever qualms people have about time-of-use / duck curves would be to invest more like $800M/year in generation and $200M/year in storage -- but still -- literal multiples of energy produced with almost zero ongoing costs.
    - ftth_finland 3y ago
      > The problem with nuclear is and has always been the opportunity cost. What opportunity cost? What else are you going to spend the money on that gives you non-polluting 24/7 power output rain or shine? > If you have $15 billion today -- you could tie it up for a decade and you might get a working 1GW reactor in 10 years (though probably more like 15). The best time to build a nuclear power plant was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. What we need is to build nuclear power at scale. Doing the same thing repeatedly for years in bound to bring both the construction time and cost down. > Or you could spend $1 billion/year and end up with probably 15GW of utility solar in the same time frame? What use is 15GW of solar in northern climes when you cannot use it when you need it and you cannot store it? In Finland solar has no output three months of the year and an additional two months of marginal output. Additional we need power 24/7, especially in winter. > Even at a 20% capacity factor instead of a 95% one, you'd be making far more money from Day 1 with solar and since we're not remotely at the saturation point of renewables, every watt generated would still be useful. I must confess I am unsure how the long term economics of renewables will work out. Around here renewables are pushing prices into the negative and increasing volatility. As a funny aside, 15 GW is the peak power usage in Finland. Adding that much generation capacity would totally saturate the market. > The right answer to whatever qualms people have about time-of-use / duck curves would be to invest more like $800M/year in generation and $200M/year in storage -- but still -- literal multiples of energy produced with almost zero ongoing costs. How many GWh of storage can you get for $200M? My guess is far from enough. We need days at a minimum, weeks for preference. 4 hours is nowhere enough.
grej 3y ago
I think solar makes sense in all of the places that otherwise are unused. Roofs and the shades of car parks, for example. But I am not a fan of giant fields of solar panels. Or worse, taking arable land and covering it with solar panels. Nuclear (smallest geographic footprint and smallest overall environmental impact) + solar & wind is the way forward.
- CyberDildonics 3y ago
  But I am not a fan of giant fields of solar panels. Or worse, taking arable land and covering it with solar panels. Why are there any negatives here? A field of solar panels is far more valuable than a field growing corn to feed to cows. Nuclear (smallest geographic footprint This doesn't matter, there is no shortage of land. People living in high rises in the center of big cities think there is, but once someone looks at a map they see how much land is actually out there. smallest overall environmental impact According to what metric? You can't put a nuclear plant anywhere, you have to be able to cool it.
  - kbar13 3y ago
    there are always environmental impacts to land when we deprive it of sunlight, which is why picking the low hanging fruit of covering man-made structures with panels would be preferable over large fields
    - CyberDildonics 3y ago
      Trees deprive land of sunlight, that seems to work out fine. Do you have any actual information or data?
    - pfdietz 3y ago
      Since there are environmental impacts of land use, it seems we should maximize the return from each unit of land, to minimize the impact per unit of benefit. Now, compare the value returned by an acre growing feed grain, to an acre collecting solar energy via PV. The latter has enormously higher return. The argument you are making is not an argument against freestanding PV, it's an argument against agriculture. And yet, it is selectively applied to PV.
ianai 3y ago
My state proposed a grid battery solution that would have provided power for the entire state for up to 1-2 days IIRC. They didn’t approve it, but the budget wasn’t astronomical. I honestly wonder if the worry about off hours use is a little overblown. Infrastructure has a history of both being expensive up front and funded. Imagine if the US didn’t have highways and trying to explain all the impacts to the GDP that modern highways make. The price would almost seem trivial compared to the trillions per year of GDP that goes over asphalt.
- ftth_finland 3y ago
  Where can I find more information about this? I can find very little information about long term storage, not that 1-2 days is much. Most seem to think 4 hours qualifies as storage.
  - pydry 3y ago
    This model thinks that 5 hours gets us to 97%: https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-grid-is-well-within-reach-and-with-little-storage/ https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g... 5 hours is pretty doable with batteries and pumped storage. It's a lot and very expensive but not an impossible amount and there aren't any cheaper/quicker alternatives that I'm aware of. I think Australia will be almost half way to 5 hours already once Snowy 2 is finished. That's just one pumped storage plant & studies show that the geography to build more is plentiful. That last 3% can probably be eventually provided with via hydrogen, which, unlike the other two, is inefficient to roundtrip (~45%) but it lets you store large amounts of power for long durations easily.
    - pfdietz 3y ago
      Glad to hear someone else beating the hydrogen (or some e-fuel) drum for that last few percent.
      - 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
        I do not understand why there is not more focus on fuel synthesis. If electricity becomes “free” for hours a day, even crummy roundtrip efficiency seems like a great option to soak up extra capacity and get long term (seasonal?) storage.
r00fus 3y ago
For baseload power I agree, but looking at Zaporizhzhia in Ukraine, it's hard not to see the downsides of nuclear: it's vulnerable to water/cooling issues and can be weaponized by terrorists or an invading army. Solar has none of these issues, and is resilient/decentralized as well.
- the8472 3y ago
  > and can be weaponized by terrorists or an invading army. These risks seem vastly overstated for a large fraction of the world. That such events happen occasionally does not mean the entire world needs to be on a war footing all the time. That would be incredibly wasteful. > it's vulnerable to water/cooling issues Yeah that seems more like an issue but may be solvable by using sea water for cooling?
  - r00fus 3y ago
    > These risks seem vastly overstated for a large fraction of the world. That such events happen occasionally does not mean the entire world needs to be on a war footing all the time. That would be incredibly wasteful. That’s part of the problem. It’s an asymmetric risk/cost issue. The attackers only need to get it right once, you need to defend your installation constantly. Security for nuclear power stations already increase the upkeep cost considerably.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- xyzzyz 3y ago
  Same can be said about cities: they are vulnerable to water issues (if a city loses access to water, it’s a major disaster), and military can weaponize them as fortification. Does it mean that we shouldn’t build cities? No, obviously not, that’s silly: it just means that you have to make sure water is flowing, and that military invasions are hugely destructive.
  - bwb 3y ago
    That isn't a good analogy. Cities have multiple water sources, and it is a very complex system. Not to mention we have special trucks and responses when that happens (at least in the USA). Nuclear has some problems.
prai1SE 3y ago
I‘m also a fan of nuclear but do you think as a global economy we can collectively invest into multiple huge industries at the same time which aim to solve the same issue (too-cheap-to-meter & renewable power, deployed asap to avoid runaway climate change)? What I mean is that wind + PV are on a roll at the moment. This has turned into a huge and hungry global industry which has a lot of momentum (people wanting to work there, technical readiness, investors ready to supply capital, public acceptance, pretty decent public opinion on the industry). From personal experience, I used the live in Munich where one of the main industry fairs (Intersolar) takes place, and it‘s a huge and ever growing event. So even though I like nuclear and agree that the currently running reactors should stay online as long as possible, I appreciate that getting the nuclear power industry to the same fitness level as the solar industry would take a long time (which we don‘t have) hence me preferring solar. This is a zero-sum mindset, which I believe applies here.
mastax 3y ago
Nuclear has been and is being invested in. Governments fund a huge amount of nuclear R&D and also often heavily subsidize plant construction. When utilities crunch the numbers to decide what to invest in building, they overwhelmingly don't choose nuclear. And yes, they are certainly taking into account intermittency, "base load" whatever you want to call it. There are arguments to be made that decision-makers at utilities aren't taking into account certain factors, for example in deregulated markets like Texas where reliability has perhaps been under-rewarded by the market design. But I think one should be especially skeptical about arguments posted by laymen versus the experts who are actually putting their money where their mouth is.

BugsJustFindMe 3y ago

> I always found it particularly grotesque coming from the HN crowd, where an audience of mostly engineers and entrepreneurs seemed to have no problem finding impossible problems that could never be solved and would therefore render solar useless on a large scale. I guess your lesson here is that most people who call themselves engineers aren't by any meaningful definition. Don't expect individual creativity from a business title that usually amounts to very little creative problem solving.

UberFly 3y ago
Your crapping on engineers blast-radius is too broad here.
- cinntaile 3y ago
  He's probably right that plenty engineers let politics or opinions get in the way of data, engineers are only human after all.
- BugsJustFindMe 3y ago
  After several decades of personal cross-industries experience across many fields and in many places, by percentage I bet it's extremely not.
raverbashing 3y ago
Yeah. Maybe the engineers of yore (but there are some thorny stories from some SV engineers in the 70's), when to build something you really needed solid technical knowledge But nowadays whoever knows how to put together a basic webpage in ~~PHP~~ React calls themselves an "engineer" and begins having grandiose ideas No wonder they got bamboozled by Theranos, uBeam, etc

oittaa 3y ago

Just take a look at any recent thread about electric vehicles and especially about Tesla. Same luddites talking about how everybody needs to drive 1000km without stopping every day.

noughtme 3y ago

> But the fanfare surrounding the phasing-out of coal and oil needs to be tempered with some realism… grid instability… investment in fossil fuel supply will rise by more than six percent… The article itself craps on solar.

ftth_finland 3y ago
How is this crapping on solar?
- ZeroGravitas 3y ago
  There's a paragraph about 2/3rds down that rolls out all the usual BS, and links to an article, by the same author, suggesting we need to slow down renewable rollout as it is "destabilising the grid".
  - not_a_shill 3y ago
    Can you please respond to this? I just want to make sure misinformation isn't being spread. >Just curious because this question is always posed when HN disagrees with something. Are the recent climate events actually statistically significant?
    - ZeroGravitas 3y ago
      Can you clarify what you are asking? If you mean: can we prove that man-made climate change is a factor in making some recent weather events (hurricanes, floods, wildfires, droughts etc.) worse, then yes: https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-how-climate-change-affects-extreme-weather-around-the-world/ https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-how-climate-change-affect...
      - not_a_shill 3y ago
        The context is I was responding to this post you made >(2021) And I'm not sure if it's posted by someone who still agrees with that conclusion or someone who think things have moved fast enough in the last couple of years to make it seem silly in retrospect. So I guess what I really want to know is: 1) what changed within the last two years that would cause an accelerating amount of climate change 2) how confident are we in that answer 3) does that answer provide any predictive power going forward. Ie, should we expect the rate of change to keep increasing or hold steady? I don't need a link to any studies, I'll take your word for it. Edit: thanks for the response

vm 3y ago

This happens with many (all?) topics, not only solar. Keep it in mind as you read media...

adaml_623 3y ago

"All the people"... Do you not realise it's different groups. And you just think it's the "HN crowd"

ZeroGravitas 3y ago

If the past trend in climate change denial is any guide, they'll just continue to crap on it, even as they are repeatedly proved dramatically wrong. Though some recent attempts to pivot to "we aren't rolling out renewables fast enough because of environmentalists" suggest a few rats jumping from the sinking ship as reality bites hard.

prai1SE 3y ago
Having been somewhat active in my uni days in „environmentalists“ orgs (eg Greenpeace), I think being blamed by everybody is part of the game as an activist. The reward is knowing that one has had an impact in pushing the needle a tiny bit. And now it slowly emerges that the decades of activism have started to pay off now that we see more amd more stats about surging PV/Wind deployment and them providing already significant chunks of electricity needs in Europe (where I‘m from) and globally.

jackmott42 3y ago

I have at times tried to explain realistic visions of what it takes for renewables to become, say, 75% of the grid and people have taken it as crapping on solar, because I describe how it will require trillion dollar scale storage solutions. But fossil fuels also require trillion dollar scale extraction solutions, so I don't see it as crapping on solar, it won't be easy but we will do it, I hope!

onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
$1T is really not that much money for the US. Energy is 4.8% of US GDP, about ~$1T. So we already have $1T to spend on energy... It's just a matter of how we spend it. This is just what things cost when you've got 335M people and most of them are relatively rich from a global perspective.
- jackmott42 3y ago
  Right, but we don't yet see this projects happening, and it might be time that they start happening. But how to talk people into that, when half of the USA thinks climate change is a liberal scam, I don't know.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  The world will spend upwards of $1Q on energy in the next century.
megaman821 3y ago
How can you accurately project costs of grid-scale store 1 or 2 decades into the future? It is an industry that is just starting out and projected to grow quite large. Profits and manufacturing labor account for greater than 50% of the battery costs now, so there is a good bit of room for prices to fall as manufacturing ramps up and the market becomes more competitive.
- jackmott42 3y ago
  You can't, it was an order of magnitude napkin math calculation I did based on the cost of pump back hydro dams in china and the amount of energy storage you would need. It is going to be in the trillions barring some radical revolution in storage that is unlikely given our breadth of knowledge of physics at this point. A lot of people think that Tesla Megapacks here and there are enough but those cover interruptions on the scale of minutes, not hours or days.

thx-2718 3y ago

I've observed the same. However I've also found, at least older engineers, often to be oddly conservative despite a huge overlap with being Star Trek fans. Makes no sense. Maybe it's like the brain gets really efficient at solving problems in a specific way that it gets harder to see problems from another angle. Regardless it's a really exciting time to be an engineer.

irrational 3y ago
I don’t understand the Star Trek reference. Can you elaborate?
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > I don’t understand the Star Trek reference. Can you elaborate Not OP, but Star Trek posits a post-scarcity economy and progressive values. (It also presents a militarized society.)
  - thx-2718 3y ago
    What would you say it's militarized? I mean, the command structure of Star Fleet mirrors the military, but as far I know the the mirror universe is the 'militarized' society.
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > the command structure of Star Fleet mirrors the military This. For someone with a longing for a culture that values duty, and with it, a sense of place and responsibility, a community with hierarchy, et cetera, Star Trek delivers. Today, those elements largely live within conservative America.
      - thx-2718 3y ago
        It is kind of interesting which parts of Roddenberry's creation people focus the most on. iirc He wanted to promote egalitarian values whilst portraying the efficiencies and comradery of a uniform service.

oh_sigh 3y ago

Well, anyone who believed in solar could have invested in solar-related technologies, and anyone who didn't believe in solar probably wouldn't invest. So, if you put your money where your mouth is(/was), you could be reaping the benefits. FSLR is +260% and SEDG is +440% over 5 years. Plus, something far more important than money, is that any time a solar-denier talks about anything forward looking in the future, you can rub their face in the fact that they mispredicted solar so badly.

standardUser 3y ago
Meh, there's some truth there, but we all know it's more complicated than just "buy solar stock -> make lots of money". An industry can BOOM while perfectly rational investors lose a buttload of money because the particular companies/etfs they picked weren't the ones that benefited from the boom.

constantcrying 3y ago

Are there any news in regards to recycling or operation length? Solar obviously "works" if it has the surrounding infrastructure, like storage and weather. Hopefully green energy subsidies can end soon.

jackmott42 3y ago
Hopefully fossil fuel subsidy ends before green ones do, they are much more expensive.
- constantcrying 3y ago
  Absolutely, use them for nuclear.
  - mikeyouse 3y ago
    Nuclear already sees a massive amount of subsidies, it's not clear that more would move the needle in any useful way.
    - constantcrying 3y ago
      Where I live there are no subsidies for nuclear, as the country is far too developed for that technology and now relies on coal, together with some seasonal sun and wind.
pfdietz 3y ago
The worst case of all renewable equipment being landfilled would be acceptable. Any recycling would just be icing on the cake. Also, the materials going into renewable infrastructure powering society will be small compared to materials going into society as a whole. If recycling can be done on the latter, it could be done on the former. If it can't be done on the latter, the former wouldn't matter. And the recycling on general materials is a problem that comes up even in a nuclear-powered society.
- 3y ago