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Comment by samschooler | Hacker News Reader

What should we replace consistent reliable baseline energy with?

Renewables + storage (both short and long term). At the current rate of improvement of these technologies, this will be cheaper. Building expensive baseload now is a recipe for stranded assets not far down the road.

Can you explain a little more about the storage part of this? I see renewables and storage mentioned every time this topic comes up. It seems like we've got the solar panels and wind turbines figured out, but I'm skeptical on the storage part. I tried doing some research myself, but everything I find reads like a press release from a company that is attempting some kind of storage. As far as I can tell, there is no actual large-scale storage operating anywhere, other than pumped hydro, which we've known about for a long time, and can't be scaled unless we start building mountains.

I mentioned I'm skeptical, but I'm genuinely asking, because I've never seen anyone ask about it.

You won’t get an answer to that.

Large scale electricity storage other than hydro power doesn’t exist and is extremely unlikely to materialize anytime in the near future.

Some advocates of renewables argue that “Power2Gas” is an option but they completely underestimate the amount of energy large countries need to store.

In Germany, for example, the daily electricity consumption is 1600 GWh. Converting that into methane would require to produce 3.5 million gas trucks filled with methane - for just a day.

And Germany’s current total hydro capacity is about 40 GWh, so only 1/40 of what we need of storage for a single day.

I don’t see a future for 100% renewables other than for small countries like Norway, Austria or Iceland who have lots of mountains for hydro power but only a fraction of the population of Germany or even the US.

It'd be especially interesting to see how expensive renewables plus storage end up being, relative to nuclear.

Any NPP started today will not be online until 2030 or later, so one should compare with renewable/storage projections of cost, not current costs. The renewable and storage systems can be brought online much faster than NPPs.

Using 2030 projections, nuclear loses.

https://model.energy/

(and that model doesn't take into account addressing intermittency with transmission or dispatchable demand, such as end-user thermal storage.)

> At the current rate of improvement of these technologies, this will be cheaper.

As you imply here, it is not cheaper now, and plan something on hopes that it will be seems not very prudent.

Past performance is not indicative of future one.

We don't know what technical and engineering problems will surface when building battery packs orders of magnitude bigger than current biggest ones.

Making plans ignoring where prices are likely to go doesn't seem prudent to me.

Investors are used to operating under uncertainty and placing their bets. The market, which reflects the combined input of all those investors, seems to think NPPs are not a good bet.

The technical issues of storage are unique to particular kinds of storage. There are many different kinds being pushed. Are you saying ALL of them are going to fail? That's a bold position, especially as cheap renewables make the environment more and more lucrative for anyone who can provide better storage technology. We're talking many trillions of dollars here, and the economic incentives will only get stronger as duck curves and CO2 taxes increase.

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