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I don't know why people always comment this on posts about renewables as if it's some kind of gotcha. When there's no sun, then other countries probably have s

I don't know why people always comment this on posts about renewables as if it's some kind of gotcha. When there's no sun, then other countries probably have sun. When there's no sun, there's hydro. When there's no hydro there's wind. When there's no wind, there's tidal. When there's no tidal there's geothermal. And when there's none of those, there's stored energy in batteries. And if for some reason all of those combined can't satisfy the demand, then there's nuclear as a last resort. And if there's none of any of those at all, then we've probably got bigger problems anyway

kgabis 3y ago
Those things don't add up - there's often no wind, no sun, no hydro. Energy storage is also orders of magnitude too small to store reasonable amounts of energy. I would argue we should start with the cleanest source of energy (which is nuclear, of course) and fill the gaps with renewables.
lazide 3y ago
Many of the plans for the future currently involve drastically undersized battery storage and decommissioning nuclear. That’s why.
- ChrisRR 3y ago
  So... my point still stands even without nuclear?
  - lazide 3y ago
    I can’t tell what your point is, frankly. That everything is fine until it isn’t, then we’re boned? Or that it will never go wrong, unless we have ‘bigger problems’? (Which are what exactly? alien invasion?) Lack of power either way certainly won’t help! If by design nuclear is offline, fossil fuels are offline, and battery capacity (or other storage) is insufficient for known (but infrequent) weather events, then we’re designing an inevitable and destructive catastrophe as we have no Plan B for when realtime production is insufficient. And that will happen some day, regardless of how much capacity we build. It’s currently the norm on many days. One that will kill a lot of people, especially the physically weaker ones, and be very destructive economically. One that will also play out randomly based on weather, and for which we’ll have no real Plan B. Being flippant about it seems rather macabre.
bluGill 3y ago
While other countries have sun when it is night here, realistically we cannot build the needed wires to get that energy here. We need 20,000km of wire to get power around the earth at the equator. Wind suffers the same problem as the sun in that sometimes there is no wind anyplace close, and it is even less predictable. While tide power is predictable and consistent, I don't live anywhere close to the ocean so we still need 2000km of wire to get it to me. Geothermo is useful when lava is close to the surface, but I don't live in such an area. Note that my power is 80% wind, but it was done via several decades of building wind turbines, and I live in Des Moines which nobody would call a big city, if you live in a big city you have even more work to build it (you are both way behind us in building wind, and have a lot more to build)
- ChrisRR 3y ago
  But you've just done exactly what I said people do wrong. Why do people only consider absolutes when talking renewables. We're not relying on a single source, and we're not relying on countries exactly the other side of the world. Sure you don't have to have a single wire from one side of the planet to the other, but that's the point in a power grid. Even connecting two solar farms to the grid a time zone apart provides an extra hour of power to each of those time zones and reduces the risk of a single cloud bringing the country down And as for the rest, you know what the electricity grid is right? Cables already run around the country, and if anything this reduces the strain on single connection as there are lots of smaller generators dotted around the country rather than a huge point of failure connected to a single power plant
- goodpoint 3y ago
  > realistically we cannot build the needed wires On the contrary, Europe, Africa, Asia, the Americas are all wide enough that they can do plenty of solar trading during the daytime. Of course that does not provide energy in the night and that's OK.

kgabis 3y ago

Those things don't add up - there's often no wind, no sun, no hydro. Energy storage is also orders of magnitude too small to store reasonable amounts of energy. I would argue we should start with the cleanest source of energy (which is nuclear, of course) and fill the gaps with renewables.

lazide 3y ago

Many of the plans for the future currently involve drastically undersized battery storage and decommissioning nuclear. That’s why.

ChrisRR 3y ago
So... my point still stands even without nuclear?
- lazide 3y ago
  I can’t tell what your point is, frankly. That everything is fine until it isn’t, then we’re boned? Or that it will never go wrong, unless we have ‘bigger problems’? (Which are what exactly? alien invasion?) Lack of power either way certainly won’t help! If by design nuclear is offline, fossil fuels are offline, and battery capacity (or other storage) is insufficient for known (but infrequent) weather events, then we’re designing an inevitable and destructive catastrophe as we have no Plan B for when realtime production is insufficient. And that will happen some day, regardless of how much capacity we build. It’s currently the norm on many days. One that will kill a lot of people, especially the physically weaker ones, and be very destructive economically. One that will also play out randomly based on weather, and for which we’ll have no real Plan B. Being flippant about it seems rather macabre.

bluGill 3y ago

While other countries have sun when it is night here, realistically we cannot build the needed wires to get that energy here. We need 20,000km of wire to get power around the earth at the equator. Wind suffers the same problem as the sun in that sometimes there is no wind anyplace close, and it is even less predictable. While tide power is predictable and consistent, I don't live anywhere close to the ocean so we still need 2000km of wire to get it to me. Geothermo is useful when lava is close to the surface, but I don't live in such an area. Note that my power is 80% wind, but it was done via several decades of building wind turbines, and I live in Des Moines which nobody would call a big city, if you live in a big city you have even more work to build it (you are both way behind us in building wind, and have a lot more to build)

ChrisRR 3y ago
But you've just done exactly what I said people do wrong. Why do people only consider absolutes when talking renewables. We're not relying on a single source, and we're not relying on countries exactly the other side of the world. Sure you don't have to have a single wire from one side of the planet to the other, but that's the point in a power grid. Even connecting two solar farms to the grid a time zone apart provides an extra hour of power to each of those time zones and reduces the risk of a single cloud bringing the country down And as for the rest, you know what the electricity grid is right? Cables already run around the country, and if anything this reduces the strain on single connection as there are lots of smaller generators dotted around the country rather than a huge point of failure connected to a single power plant
goodpoint 3y ago
> realistically we cannot build the needed wires On the contrary, Europe, Africa, Asia, the Americas are all wide enough that they can do plenty of solar trading during the daytime. Of course that does not provide energy in the night and that's OK.