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Comment by martinald | Hacker News Reader

Not true in northern European countries. The problem isn't day to day regulation, it's the massive demand in cold snaps in winter (when there is very little wind generation - cold weather tends to have little wind). You're talking balancing 20-30GW of additional demand with little solar/wind generation for weeks/months - probably at least 1TWh of storage required for the UK alone.

Keep in mind this will only get worse as heating demand is switched from natgas to electricity.

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This seems like a "running before we can walk" statement. Until we can handle day to day problems, it seems weird to worry about edge cases. I imagine as we transition to renewables and storage we will still have fossil fuel peeker plants to handle these sorts of snaps.

It won't be until our power storage is far more beefed up that we'll shut those down, and that will take years.

A cold snap like that can happen every 3-5 years, think really cold February. If you don't have the capacity to handle it people will die and lots of things will break. It is not an edgcase

It's actually worse than that, there are many days in winter in the UK with high demand and virtually no solar/wind output. But obviously a really cold snap would be even worse (and as you said isn't an edge case - even if it is look at the damage that happened in Texas when it wasn't accounted for)

Agree. See Texas for an example.

It is when we aren't running 1 year on pure renewables. Let's worry about events that happen every 3 to 5 years when we've got 1 year of renewable only figured out.

It will take years before this is potentially a problem and by that time we'll likely have gone through a few cold snaps.

> This seems like a "running before we can walk" statement.

Europe tries to be at a forefront of green energy. No sun/wind is a real issue there, not just an edge case.

Yup, where I live there can be 3 months of fog/clouds... meaning minimal wind / sun.

Global warming will resolve that issue soon enough.

Right, and my point is that they aren't going to decommission all backup power until they are at the point where sun/wind/storage can actually be relied on for more than just the good days.

We have a long trip to get there, so why worry about a once in 3/5 year event? We wouldn't go a year without fossil fuels and say "Ok, that was it! Demolish all the plants right now!"

Arguably, if a gas plant hasn't run for a year then it'll go bankrupt and shut down pretty soon.

In a system where it's a backup, it shouldn't be both independently owned and have revenue tied only to use.

Homes in the UK are poorly insulated, likely due to a previous over-reliance on fossil fuels. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/damian-carrington-bl... Better insulation and switching to district heating where applicable could yield massive savings.

District heating still needs heat to come from somewhere. Admittedly, low grade heat like is used for heating can be stored for days in the form of hot water in insulated tanks.

All the while the north sea with it's wind is right there, and the Sahara with it's sun nearby too.

Some investment in long distance power transmission would go a long way towards smoothing out the grid.

Importing energy from Sahara comes with serious geopolitical issues. Do you really want to commit to peacekeeping in a huge area of Africa? Keep in mind that oil can be stockpiled much more easily than electricity, stockpiles that let you weather small storms. Importing electricity means being on top of every hint of a blip.

There are many countries in North Africa of varying levels of stability and many locations for potential underwater transmission lines.

If Israel can build natural gas pipelines to Italy, I think we can handle a subsea electrical cable.

You don't want all your eggs in one basket, but this seems like a poor excuse for having zero eggs at all.

Long distance power transmission is a significant political and military liability, not to mention a fantastic terrorist target.

We cannot guarantee that the UK will be at peace with every county between them and the Sahara forever. Hosting the power line would grant significant political or military leverage.

You don't want a single point of failure. Having multiple lines across a geographic space is the way to go.

It's a big upfront investment, but it could be much cheaper than storage at scale.

I think ultimately you want power transmission stretching from the UK to Japan so as the sun moves the power generation continues.

I imagine it will happen one day, because it would seem to make so much sense, but this is something governments could make happen a lot sooner if they put their mind to it.

Wrt cold snaps being a big problem, it seems like we could just massively insulate dwelling and improve our energy use auditing, if it became necessary? Vacuum insulation panels are a bit pricey, but they’re crazy insulative for the thickness. If we’re willing to deal with thicker walls, there are a variety of other options that are downright cheap (shredded newspaper, for example).

We’ve been designing around super cheap on-demand energy for a while now, but we did manage before that.

I’d just build the generation out to that maximal use case. During the off peak times power a desalination, hydrogen, or other energy intensive plant.

The problem is the UK sees maybe 1-2GW of renewable generation sometimes in winter while demand is about 50GW. So you'd have to overbuild 25x to cope with these days.

Keep in mind the UK already has about 30GW of solar and wind potential nameplate capacity. Your suggestion would result in a requirement of 700GW of solar and wind to be installed. On windy and sunny days would result in probably 350GW of generation, at least 300GW more than we need.

Seems nuclear would be more optimal there.

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