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Comment by clarry | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one who thinks this is all good, in fact?

The push for extra capacity and small scale distributed energy storage increases redundancy / eliminates large single points of failure. Whereas the status quo is a huge power plant serving a city and when a blackout/brownout occurs, it's darkness and blinking lights and chaos all over.

Yeah it costs some money to get there. Cheapest isn't always the best.

Also, I feel like a large distributed network of smaller generators & storage solutions is going to foster innovation in a way that one huge power plant that stands for decades cannot.

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> The push for extra capacity and small scale distributed energy storage increases redundancy / eliminates large single points of failure. Whereas the status quo is a huge power plant serving a city and when a blackout/brownout occurs, it's darkness and blinking lights and chaos all over.

Unfortunately most systems are "anti-islanding"; if they lose a link or go outside parameters, they shut down. A brownout is rarely because the nearest plant has gone down and more likely due to a transmission system fault.

The recent UK large outage postmortem is interesting reading: https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/publications-and-updates/investigat...

The problem is, existing market mechanisms for power don't work well for this.

A wind operator will face a low energy price when wind is overproducing; but society needs wind to be significantly overprovisioned to avoid burning carbon.

> The push for extra capacity and small scale distributed energy storage

Storage is really hard. We don't know how to meaningfully do it yet. Maybe concentrated/thermal solar power will deliver it. Maybe power->gas->power will. Batteries are at best a small stopgap.

Further, the net result is that we have less grid stability, because we have variable loads and lots of non-dispatchable generation. The loading on transmission is fairly unpredictable, too.

I don’t really see how the law could not allow for wind farms to never have to pay for energy they generate to subsidise their existence.

> but society needs wind to be significantly overprovisioned to avoid burning carbon.

Should be "...overprovisioned in order to completely avoid burning any carbon relying on wind power alone"

> Storage is really hard. We don't know how to meaningfully do it yet.

This is plainly misunderstood. Storage can already be bought, currently costs between 165 and 305 $/MWh [1]. And the price reliably drops as there is more demand and development in it. There is no huge demand for storage yet. Long term storage can actually take the form of carbon neutral fuels and use existing thermelectric plants to generate when required. No "maybe" about that, its existing commercial tech.

[1] https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019/

Storage is done reliably with water pumping and storage all the time. The question is efficiency.

Batteries have been scaled up to 100MW/129MWh [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve

If your main goal is to get a more distributed power grid, it's great.

If your main goal is to decarbonize our grid before climate change wrecks civilization, then anything that makes that more expensive is bad. We're way behind in that race already.

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