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Comment by nimish | Hacker News Reader

Solar and wind are getting so cheap that you could feasibly overbuild to deal with low production times. And no, 30% is nowhere near the max, especially with storage

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Overbuild, and also use the excess to make hydrogen.

They're getting so cheap because they produce energy at times we don't need it, so market price fall through the ground to zero or even negative flash prices. Low prices are an compound artefact of heavy subsidizing and production in complete inadequacy with demand.

Electricity storage doesn't exist. There is no existing industrial solution at scale (except hydro, but there's no room left for expansion in Europe). We're talking of scales of many GWh of storage. Then there's price of a multi-GWh storage.

Our society is entirely relying on on-demand power generation. Wind and solar are utterly inadequate tools. In actuality while Spain installed 20GW of wind and solar, it also installed 15 GW of gas-powered plants. Climate change anyone?

No, that’s wrong, they are cheap on a levelized basis, those costs don’t rely on spot pricing.

The subsidies used in the UK are primarily Contracts for Difference. A Contract for Difference works by assuring the power plant they will always get paid a fixed price regardless. When the actual price paid for power is higher, the government gets the difference, when it's lower the government pays a subsidy. This is effective because it provides investors with certainty - if the power plant they're paying to build makes 100MWh of electricity at CfD strike price of £60/MWh they definitely get paid £6000.

As well as storage there are interconnects. Most of the time we buy French power, they have a lot of Nukes, but Wind is cheaper even than the French Nukes, so when we have lots of wind we do not buy French nuclear power. The interconnects have the effect of somewhat smearing European weather effects across the continent as far as power is concerned.

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