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Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

Anyone looking at the past 10 years of solar and wind growth and price declines who is still "unsure" what the future will bring in the next 10 years and what they should be betting on doesn't deserve to run the given power companies.

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Obviously there is going to be an increased amount of solar and wind coming online in the near future, and I don't think that anyone running a power system network at the distribution or transmission level is going to dispute that. However there definitely is uncertainty about how much, and there is even more uncertainty about what our loads are going to look like with large amounts of EVs coming online and potential battery deployments. These things could have a big impact on the size and timing of grid peaks and inertia which can require big investments to manage appropriately. And as with any big investment, you want to make it at the right time, and you want to be sure that you are going to make a return on that investment.

It's also important to note that the value of solar/wind on a grid declines as they become a larger percentage of the power. These power sources are much less consistent and storage technology doesn't exist yet. And if it did, it would require big investments, which obviously dilutes any cost advantage.

Since this is a discussion mentioning software a lot, it's worth mentioning that big battery cars can be a storage source if they're plugged in at work and at home -- a prediction of whether the owner wants to be full combined with a prediction of near-term renewable generation and you've got a lot of storage without having to pay for it.

Tell that to the designers of the Pentium 4. Exponential growth can't continue forever, and it's not always obvious when it's going to end.

OK if you know the answers - what % of cars in the US will be fully electric in 10 years? 20 years? Will offshore windfarms be allowed in the US? Will household electricity consumption rise or fall? Will Trump subsidize coal? People really don't know the answers to those questions. Of course they're unsure.

> Will household electricity consumption rise or fall?

It looks like it'll plateau. As we add more appliances, they just tend to become more efficient.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/201794/us-electricity-co...

Its over- any attempt to delay solars victory with regulations, will result in solar being deployed elsewhere (offshore/ south-america) and then delivered at combat prices to the border, deforming a future energy grid even further.

Unless the government start charging crazy fees for imported power...

I wish there was some way to unionize dis-aligned interests. The whole public and all of the industry pays for such mobster schemes, but is unable to rally a viable defense against one little lobby, because...?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action

That's only so if you don't take transmission losses into account. Somehow many people tend to forget that transmission isn't free or even cheap.

Indeed. Energy in chemical form is astonishingly cheap to transmit (and store), but, as electricity, it's completely different. The storage problem is part of the point of the article, of course.

I always thought this was one of the advantages of rooftop solar, that it would reduce transmission costs by bringing generation closer to consumption, especially at peak, and not necessarily because of costs due to losses in the transmission lines, but costs due to maintaining the necessary capacity in those lines (a challenge for both the SFBA and NYC, IIUC).

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