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Comment by shoguning | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, that is mentioned as "one of the downsides of renewables".

That is like saying, "one of the downsides of using a cooked noodle as a fork is that it doesn't hold its shape". It's disqualifying until that issue is sorted.

The value of solar right now is that it provides energy at the hottest, most energy use part of the day. But there is a tipping point where marginal solar is not really valuable for a grid anymore. California and Germany are at that point.

Hopefully we get cost-effective day-scale energy storage, it's not going to happen in the next few years unfortunately.

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It's certainly not disqualifying until we are at far far far higher levels of renewables on the grid. Getting to 80% generation would take very little storage.

And people overestimate how much storage costs. In Texas, even with super cheap natural gas, there are more GW of storage in the interconnection queue than there are of natural gas plants. That's at today's prices, in a market where everybody competes on their own costs!

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

And greater than 95% of new solar projects in California include storage, and something like 25% of projects outside of California include storage along with the renewables.

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/hybrid-power-pl...

We don't absolutely need to deploy storage right now, but independent agents are still doing it, because they make money by deploying storage at current costs.

Well, at least the upside is that this will be another forcing function for better battery tech.

Another step up in battery tech would literally level us up as a civilization.

> But there is a tipping point where marginal solar is not really valuable for a grid anymore.

And that is a very good problem to have.

There are any number of industrial processes that could easily put that excessively cheap energy to use. Aluminum smelting, for example.

electrolysis, bitcoin mining (!), electric car recharging, etc.

It isn't. Your base load stations close and you are left only with the intermittent reweables and natural gas. South Australia is the only energy market in that place right now and the prices paid there would destroy any industrial economy.

"Renewables, natural gas and a couple of nuclear plants" is the UK situation, with normal electricity prices. Almost all the coal is closed permanently.

People will keep saying it won't work long after it's already been done.

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