Comment by WarOnPrivacy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by WarOnPrivacy | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Could someone who is more R-Wing than I am, please explain why you have an unshakable preference for fossil fuels?

We are zeroing in on free energy from renewables, so it isn't economics - not any longer. With that past us, why do folks on the right even care where we get our energy from?

If the argument is jobs - well, that's a weak argument because the only job fields that either party cares about are those that can be leveraged for politics.

If the jobs argument includes thwarting disruptive technologies to prop up legacy industries - well, that doesn't sound very Keynesian to me.

Even so, I'll accept the jobs argument. I would love to see Appalachian coal regions become a mecca for renewable manufacturing. I'd love to see N.Dakota oil workers own massive energy generating coops (or whatever someone who actually groks energy comes up with). I'd be happy to see my tax dollars fund the heck out that. So whatever your jobs[1] complaint is, assume I accept it and agree to subsidize worthwhile substitutes.

Once jobs and economics is off the table, why are you still attached to fossil fuels?

[1] Shareholding isn't a job.

Renewables don't provide constant power without city-scale energy storage, which doesn't exist (yet) at any reasonable price point. Solar for example won't provide power after sunset or on cloudy days.

Because you can't rely on renewables to provide power throughout every day/year, you need to have natural gas/coal/nuclear available. Those have very high fixed costs (other than natural gas), but very low marginal costs, so once you have built them it is cheaper to just use them than to build additional renewable power infrastructure.

That is exactly nuclear energy comes in. It is impossible to actually run a grid off a renewable (esp. Solar) energy power-plant in any stable manner.

Nuclear energy serves the purpose of acting as the filler for the delta between the peak and trough.

>Nuclear energy serves the purpose of acting as the filler for the delta between the peak and trough.

No. Just. No.

It's incredibly stupid and inefficient to use nuclear as a peak power plant. Due to the huge CAPEX reasonable power system should use nuclear for base load and maximize capacity factor as much as possible.

Yes, there are experiments on maneuvering nuclear plants, but: a) usually maneuvering range is relatively small (60-80% from max output) b) latency is still too big when compared to gas plants and hydroelectric storage. There are some micro-nuclear plant designs, which would be more flexible and more suitable for this scenario, but they are mostly just paper reactors.

I'm pretty sure your parent comment was suggesting the opposite of what you understood them to be suggesting.

I believe they meant the delta time between peaks, rather than the delta power between baseline and peak.

If the topic here is still "not R-wing enough", Nuclear power is something that Republicans generally agree with increasing more so than Democrats [1].

It's still lower than I'd prefer, further nuclear power research seems by far the best way to truly go off fossil fuels long term (even with the improvements in batteries, we are several orders of magnitude away from it actually being realistic to build them for power grid scale energy storing).

New reactor designs can go 72 hours [2] without any human interaction, which avoids much of the natural disaster concerns, such as requiring generators for cooling, which is what caused the major problems in Fukushima.

[1] https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/4/23/1850729...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP1000

>It is impossible to actually run a grid off a renewable (esp. Solar) energy power-plant in any stable manner.

I agreed with that before Tesla's Big Battery experiment - and that leveraged established tech. I can't wait to see how sodium or one of the other, in-dev materials eventually supplant lithium, on a massive scale.

> I agreed with that before Tesla's Big Battery

Tesla's battery isn't really grid-scale energy storage of the kind you'd need to do 100% renewables. It's more for smoothing out fluctuations in the grid than for filling in for intermittent sources when conditions are poor.

If the gamble on renewables works out, it will be because of geological hydrogen energy storage. That's the only way to get country-days worth of storage at a price that's actually feasible (if it works in practise like it does on paper).

> It is impossible to actually run a grid off a renewable

It is equally impossible to run a grid from only nuclear power. These assets can't "load follow" which is why in the US the 1970s build-out of nuclear power was contemporaneous with the build-out of pumped hydro storage.

Europe already runs load following plants for a long time now. Article from 2011.

https://www.oecd-nea.org/nea-news/2011/29-2/nea-news-29-2-lo...

> Renewables don't provide constant power without city-scale energy storage, which doesn't exist (yet) at any reasonable price point.

I think that depends on the shape of the infrastructure. Super-dense cities seem like the least accommodating to near-future renewable/storage tech. Suburbs and rural areas seem like a much better fit to deploy the tech as it matures - which is happening fast.

I can accept that if we include the trend that combinations of renewable tech are clearly closing those gaps.

It seems reasonable that policy discussions about future energy should be increasingly dominated by renewables. That the worth of fossil fuels will steadily diminish toward a niche value ought to be a universally accepted understanding.

Its not that I lean right but the real bitch is "ENERGY DENSITY" and Geographic specificity of Wind and Solar.

Also a little understanding about the grid, dynamic generation and duck curve convinced me that we need predictable generation. I am not for FOSSIL FUELS, its just that Nuclear and ONG are the real choices. Solar in American South West and Wind at the foot of Rockies and Southern Plains make general sense, but the usually they are far away from Cities.

Long story short - there may be lobbyists running around doing naughty stuff, the general bigger problems are Physics, Geography and "existing" technology - Battery Storage.

Wind and solar are both very predictable on a day-ahead basis. Though both offer a lower capacity value than fuel-based generation and energy storage (pumped hydro and batteries).

The Duck Curve convinced me of something different -- that flat-rate power prices don't send the appropriate price signal to the market. Supply and demand should be balanced through price signals like most everything else in the economy. And then let the free market figure it out.

Is it fair assumption that Pumped hyrdo needs a mountain or high elevation in the vicinity of the city ? US has one pumped hyrdo, if I am not wrong.

Yes, it does require a change in elevation. The US has many pumped hydro systems. Wikipedia lists ten in the US that are larger than 1,000 MW. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroel...

US has many. Even the UK has three

Ten to fifteen years ago, I felt we were, at best, 100 years from minimal fossil fuel use. Today, I think it's 40 years.

Note: I'm specifically picking on fossil fuels because I'm still holding out hope for safer, smaller-scale nuclear tech. I can't tell how realistic that is tho.

Regarding your observations: They seem to indicate (or at least allow) that there's low-hanging fruit, that we ought to be grabbing now.

Gen4 Nuclear and possible Fusion reactors will power the world. Sodium Batteries or some other breakthrough will be need Li will not do on Battery front.

Solar and Wind will have limited impact. Disposing Solar panels and Wind mills after their useful life is going to be its own TOXIC Waste problem.

Solar in space is an interesting idea too.

> We are zeroing in on free energy from renewables...

The right wing tends to believe that if a problem can be solved by an individual then there is no need for a government response.

If the assumptions in your question were true, you, WarOnPrivacy, could become a billionaire by outcompeting fossil fuel plants. Therefore no political action is needed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com