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Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

It's not solved yet, because energy is not deregulated enough, and entrenched financial interests won't go down without a legislative fight.

For example, in Ohio several state legislators were purchased, and passed regulation claiming to "save" nuclear but what it really did was bail out coal and prevent the cheapest source of energy from competing in the market. The most surprising is that this corruption is actually resulting in prosecutions, and the top regulator has now resigned too:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-20/firstener...

Funny you should bring up Texas, it actually is installing massive batteries, with 17GW in the pipeline last time I heard. And natural gas is dwindling to nothing, getting replaced with solar. ERCOT is one of the very very very few places where cheapest cost can actually win, and it's where we are going to see natural gas die first because of that.

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I live in tx, and have a bit of knowledge about this.

Gas plants are still being constructed, and there are more in planning. There is 0 indication its going anywhere anytime soon.

Gas plants are replacing coal plants: https://www.power-eng.com/2019/04/11/eia-gas-fired-combined-...

They're generally cheaper to run and better at load-following.

Coal has been on the way out for a decade or so, long before renewable energy started to be a big player in the US.

Right, but its the NG that enables the wind because of said load following. That combined with the fact that they are super cheap to build, and the US has a huge glut in NG due to fracking and regulation on how much we can sell internationally.

But, that isn't the point. The point is that even if we go to a ~70% wind model, we will _STILL_BE_WORSE_OFF_THAN_FRANCE_WAS_40_YEARS_AGO_.

The "Green energy" movement there is _INCREASING_ their CO2 production.

https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/france-co2-emiss...

I don't get why this is so hard to understand for all those down voters. Worse, at the current rates, we won't get there for decades.

Click the link and look at the graph in my parent comment. Gas started rising in 2002, when wind and solar had an invisibly small presence in the US market.

It sure sounds like you were arguing that renewable energy had a time-travel effect causing the construction of gas before the renewables were added?

People are downvoting because what you're saying makes no sense.

You realize that the natural gas plants sit mostly idle when renewables are producing enough power, right? And the more renewable capacity we build, the more often that happens?

> Worse, at the current rates, we won't get there for decades.

So, about the same timespan it took to execute the Messmer plan in France, and at a fraction of the cost? (The Messmer plan was France's big nuclear buildout from the 70s through the 90s.)

On a side note, even if we started building reactors today they probably wouldn't be operational for a decade or more (including planning time).

> The point is that even if we go to a ~70% wind model, we will _STILL_BE_WORSE_OFF_THAN_FRANCE_WAS_40_YEARS_AGO_.

No.[1]

Denmark has about 48% of their energy from wind, and their per capita carbon emissions are at the same level as in 1960.[2] Ireland with 33% is at the same level as in 1980.[3] Portugal with 27% now has the same emissions as 1990.[4]

There is a trend here.

> I don't get why this is so hard to understand for all those down voters.

You are ignoring data that doesn't agree with your hypothesis.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/217804/wind-energy-penet...

[2] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?location...

[3] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?location...

[4] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?location...

Since 2019/early 2020, the data disagrees with your assessment. Gas plants are leaving the interconnection queue, and massive amounts of solar and wind are coming in:

https://rmi.org/clean-energy-is-canceling-gas-plants/

The market is responding to the inflection point, where renewables are clearly the lowest cost energy.

The switch is happening right now!

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