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Comment by tpmx | Hacker News Reader

From another country that also has almost entirely co2-clean electric power, at least for now:

Sweden in November: 38.7%, up 2.7x YoY

https://cleantechnica.com/2020/12/02/swedens-ev-sales-hit-ne...

I worry about the current trend of both France and Sweden shutting down nuclear plants without building any replacements though. Wind power is great, I suppose (the jury is still out on the sustainability of the hardware - but it's not looking great at the moment - massive amounts of concrete needed causing kinda huge co2 emissions during the chemical manufacturing processes), but it's no good as a baseline power for days when there's no wind and the hydro power is running on low. The fallback for that scenario is burning coal or oil.

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Baseline power is less of an issue for EVs, since they a) have their own energy storage built in, and b) generally just run ~ 1 hour a day, making it pretty easy to come up with schemes to shift demand around.

Agree the trend of decommissioning nuclear plants is counterproductive for other reasons though.

I guess I'm mostly worried about the wind power trend.

a) Politicians love them

b) Politicians really don't understand power grids

c) They don't seem to be that "green", after all, if you consider the life span and the co2 emissions from the concrete manufacturing.

If the next-best alternative on point (c) was nuclear, nuclear is probably less polluting. But since nuclear is off the table, since people react really poorly to rare events that cause towns to be uninhabitable, the next-best for (c) is going to be natural gas or another fossil source. I'll take wind any day.

I read an essay talking about another field where the authors conclusions apply to nuclear vs wind and solar.

He participated in research on low cost rocket designs. His take away was the actual design wasn't as important as building more rockets rather than less.

With solar you make panels by the 100 million. Wind turbines by the tens of thousand. Nuclear by the low digits. Per year.

Not green? Really? Anything here change your mind:

https://www.factcheck.org/2018/03/wind-energys-carbon-footpr...

Wind is dynamic generation - that means there is a likelihood within the system where there is a backup generation when wind is not blowing. I am not expert, but the way Grid works, you cannot simply pick the wind farm, you have to have a systems view of the wind farm and how its back-up (likely NG generator) interact as a whole and does wind blow during the high demand etc. Wind at right places is excellent but outside of those geographic areas its a dead end. Also, windy places tend to be farther from where the demand is and you have to include transmission related expenditure. I think 500 mile distance is more or less rule of thumb considered not good, economically or environmentally.

A metaphor if I may engage, is you cannot get a six pack with pure calorie counting, you have to have a bit more sophisticated system in nutrition and work outs for that. Same thing applies for The Grid, a wind mill of same specification at two different locations will give different yields, at different time of day and have completely different effect on system as a whole.

There are a number of people who do understand how grids work who still love wind and solar.

> Baseline power is less of an issue for EVs, since they a) have their own energy storage built in, and b) generally just run ~ 1 hour a day, making it pretty easy to come up with schemes to shift demand around.

Is that really true when much of the employed population falls on a relatively uniform commute schedule?

I'd expect similar congestion to what's seen on roadways to recur on an inadequate power grid.

Yes it's still true. To charge an EV the average person needs around 10kWh a day, distributed over 23h of parking time. That's not a lot of current. You just need to teach the car to talk to the grid so that not all cars charge at once.

23h? That strikes me as ridiculously optimistic on a population-scale level.

When only charged at home it's just an overnight charging window.

Cars are parked about 23h a day. Eventually most parking spots will also have a charger, because that's pretty much the only way EVs will be adopted in cities where people don't have garages.

I'm not sure how this looks WRT grid limits/congestion, but there's an alternative mass-adoption scenario where battery tech matures to the point of charge rates becoming equal or better than "gassing up" today.

We don't have gas pumps at every parking spot and drivers are generally content with the current situation.

Ah yes, that's of course also possible, but I think it's a lot less likely, because the shift to EVs needs to happen quite quickly, imho before batteries had time to improve sufficiently.

Anyone having charger at home will never voluntarily connect the charger at work or in town unless they actually are desperate for charge.

Why?

Also, most people live in cities. Most people in cities don't have a charger at home.

1. It is a hassle with no benefit.

2. At least one but perhaps several orders of magnitudes more expensive than doing it at home. In part because you can charge overnight when pricing is the lowest.

I'd guess most people that have a EV-vehicle have a charger at home.

Both points are true today, but need not be true in the future. If everyone plugging in and charging at 20kW around 6pm becomes a problem (at it probably would be one), then the incentives will change.

Most people in cities don't have cars at all. They use public transportation or ride sharing. Parking a car in a city is expensive, especially since you need to park it both at home and at your destination.

Cities are full of cars during the day, but the parking lots empty out at night. They live in less-dense suburbs, where it's comparatively easy to park and comparatively easy to have a charger installed. In the city, many of those who are willing to afford a car at all will also find ways to charge it (including sharing a few charging stations at their garage).

The median driving distance in the EU is 30 km. The electric cars on sale use 15-20 kWh per 100 km. Thus daily routine per median will be 5-7.5 kWh. The current will be even less than the parent’s statement.

I recall a study that if 80% of cars were electric in the U.K., it will increase the load on the grid by 10-20%.

There are about 40 millions cars in France:

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parc_automobile_fran%C3%A7ais

Cars are parked 95% of the time.

Even a smallish 2 kW car to grid capacity would give 80 GW of instantaneuous dispatchable power to the grid. And cars are distributed on all the territory.

If average battery is about 50 kWh that gives a whole day of France max demand.

And of course on the other way 80 GW of dispatchable demand.

For reference electro-nuclear production capacity is 62 GW in France.

A fully electric car fleet means the grid will just never go down.

How would car owners be compensated for the grid using their car’s battery? More wear and tear from more charge/discharge cycles, and the potential for the car to not be fully charged when the owner needs it?

That's the whole issue with grid and smart grid, what is the true price of electricity? :)

This is all software controlled, all new cars in Europe have a SIM card (eCall law), electric cars are computer on wheels, nothing is missing but the will to do it.

My Tesla model 3 SR+ has 50 kWh of NCA batteries with about 1000-1500 cycles, so about 600k km (to 70% of original capacity). Petrol car leave the european market with about 200-250k km on the odometer (source: discussion with a car journalist).

If you buy a Tesla model 3 SR+ right now in Europe it's made in China with LFP chemistry which is much more durable 3000-6000 cycles to about 2 millions km.

That gives plenty of room to play with car batteries without too much detriment.

And I assume you'll be able to limit discharging to some value to avoid getting stuck on your parking :).

In Ireland, eCall was only accepted on the condition that it only ever be used for ACR and no other purpose, so I don't think we'll see any EU standards using that eSim for charge control.

I don't think for example my Tesla model 3 has two distinct SIM one for eCall and another one for other data.

Do you have a link to Ireland law about eCall?

In Europe GDPR force to require consent for personnal data use like most car data is, once consent is given I see no reason not to use the already present SIM for eCall for other purposes.

I suppose you could get financial compensation (maybe in the form of cheaper power) if you hook your battery up. But I think the fact that your car battery might not have enough power when you need it is going to be a dealbreaker for many people.

I think if all parking infrastructure was equipped with “smart” charging equipment, then it wouldn’t be much of a problem, I don’t think. In the future, theoretically, most cars will be electric, and if the current pattern of having a car parked 95% of the time holds true, then only a small percent of each car’s battery would be needed to balance the grid.

Massive amounts of concrete are also required for nuclear plants to be built. You've got to quantify it or it's scaremongering.

> You've got to quantify it or it's scaremongering.

It is an interesting question. I did an estimate:

1x Windmill, 3.6MW for 500 m3 concrete [0, 1]

1x Hinkley Point C base, nameplate 3.2GW for 18,000 m3 [2]

I don't know how much Hinkley Point overall might use, because a lot might go into the shell, so say the overall build is an order of magnitude more than the base. That is 180k m3 of concrete or about 360 windmill foundations in Hinkley with some rather unfavourable assumptions. So a 3.2 GW nuclear reactor might match up to ~1.3 GW of Windfarm.

Depending on how much goes into the base vs the shell it is probably somewhere between 3x to an order of magnitude favouring nuclear. Not considering relative lifetime, although I expect a nuclear concrete pour has better long-term prospects (how would they replace the windmill without re-pouring the base?).

[0] https://www.wagner.com.au/main/our-projects/sapphire-wind-fa...

[1] https://www.sapphirewindfarm.com.au/

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

Three million tonnes of concrete will be used to build Hinkley Point. Source: https://www.nrl.co.uk/projects/hinkley-point-c

If there is anything that requires lots of materials per installed Megawatts then it’s solar and wind.

Your argument completely ignores the fact that nuclear has the highest energy density and availability of all currently available energy sources.

The whole world consumes massive amounts of concrete for all kinds of construction project. The energy industry is a tiny part of that.

We should definitely try and reduce the amount of embodied CO2 in wind turbines. But it is hardly a differentiating factor when comparing nuclear and wind. Both are fantastic in terms of co2 when compared to the fossil fuels they are replacing. We only talk about embodied co2 because the other emissions are so non-existent!

Emissions from concrete are a problem which needs to be addressed separately to energy production. Other industries need to do their bit and provide alternatives.

Base load power generation is not something that you need, but it’s more of a description how to run an electric grid with slow power plants like nuclear or coal. With renewables you of course need a different strategy.

It's something that every installed grid in the world needs, and no-one is talking about replacing grid infrastructure.

Hydro will be the backup power. With enough solar and wind generation there's no need for hydro to be on all the time. Hydroelectric dams are the biggest energy storage facilities we have.

Hydro can't scale up to the extent of gas without causing massive floods and other havoc downstream. Batteries can probably help a lot for peak shaving but I think in the medium term is mostly going to displace SSGTs more than anything else.

Well, in germany we at least decided that wind is not worth it...

We are basically building back wind farms and not building new ones.

Citation?

Wind generated about a quarter of German electricity in 2019, but there seems to be growing public resistance to new onshore farms and growth has fallen dramatically.

The article below gives a reasonable overview of the causes:

https://m.dw.com/en/german-wind-energy-stalls-amid-public-re...

While new construction is still far too low, the numbers have since gotten better in 2020:

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/modest-wind-power-expan...

But I was responding to another argument: the parent claimed that wind power is actually removed. Except for some fear mongering that it might happen in the future I can't find any evidence for this. So still waiting on a citation on that original claim.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.sueddeutsche.de/wirtschaft/...

Starting with 2021 old wind farms will be build back, since there is a new rule about 1000m,new ones cant be build, hence reducing the available area.

Thank you for this comment, underlining the advantage of nuclear versus renewables is a hard fight and I don't read that kind of comment very often.

Renewables clearly have no place when it comes to generate a lot of energy. They're interesting in a few cases where there's a lot of wind, or where there is no power grid and you need a little power.

Others advocate reducing energy consumption, but if we reduce co2 emissions from transport, we will need more electricity.

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