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Comment by coldpie | Hacker News Reader

You can predict the supply of wind, as an average over a long enough period of time, much more easily than you can predict the supply of oil.

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But will that prediction enable you to scale demand? With increasing hardware lifecycles, it might one day be economic for a global like Google to overprovision datacenters enough to be able to shift compute load to wherever intermittent energy is available. Requests can be routed over much longer distances than energy. But I suspect that Moore's law just isn't dead enough yet to make it economical to keep large datacenters offline just to wait for locally favorable energy prices. And on this scale, economical is a pretty good first approximation of ecological.

"You can predict the supply of wind, as an average over a long enough period of time, much more easily than you can predict the supply of oil."

Over the long haul, yes, but in real-time - no. And electricity prices to fluctuate a lot over days, weeks etc..

But indicating that 'price stability' is a point for green is not really fair, when it's almost always going to be considerably more expensive.

Knowing that something is going to be 'consistent, and consistently more expensive', I don't think is a good argument for green.

There are other, better arguments.

> Over the long haul, yes, but in real-time - no. And electricity prices to fluctuate a lot over days, weeks etc..

You'd deal with this the same way you deal with it in every other commodity market, futures contracts.

Yes, of course, but a futures contract definitely adds cost, is my point.

Google is in effect doing the same thing as 'buying a future' and it's unreasonable for him to make the argument that this is 'inherently a better thing about green'.

I could buy a futures contract for Oil today and would it be fair for me to say 'Oil is has more stability in prices'?

The difference is you know the supply of wind. It fluctuates with the weather, but on average you know if you have X windmills you'll have Y joules, the risk in future contracts is a lot smaller, and priced accordingly. The oil supply is a lot more complicated, and the risk priced into future contracts is priced accordingly.

Ok, I see that.

But Oil shouldn't fluctuate too-too far between $50 and $120 a barrel. And that's just the raw costs. With all other components, which costs will be more fixed, the actual end price of fuel should not change more than 40% in either direction, max.

I'd argue that the greatly varying costs of wind installations, aggregate availability, huge one: supply and demand for electricity overall, specifically for renewable electricity - regulator changes, improvements in technology - definitely create a situation wherein the 'end cost' of renewable electricity is somewhere in the range of the variability for fuel produced by other means.

Wind power is already cheaper than coal, at least in Australia, even when you ignore the cost of building the coal plant (it's been way cheaper for a long time if you factor in the initial construction cost), and solar will soon reach the same crossover point.

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