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Comment by strictnein | Hacker News Reader

You need baseload power. On a dark windless night, when everyone is charging their electric cars, you can't just have brownouts and blackouts.

And sure, you can imagine a power grid that's smart enough to handle all of that, but implementation of something like that isn't any faster than the construction of more nuclear power.

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Most countries are pretty far away from the amount of renewables where you start requiring lots of storage. You can easily do 50% renewables for electricity with hardly any storage at all.

I agree, but not with the "50%" number.

“Without technological breakthroughs in efficient, large scale energy storage, it will be difficult to rely on intermittent renewables for much more than 20-30 percent of our electricity.” Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy - 2010.

https://grist.org/article/2010-02-22-energy-secretary-steven...

The how does Denmark manage 60%, and Germany 50%?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewab...

Technically, from your own numbers... Denmarks intermittent renewables (wind + solar) is 43%. Germany is 34%. Biofuel & Hydro are not intermittent.

I don't know, that's pretty impressive. Maybe they have international connectors with other countries? I think Germany buys Nuclear power from France? or maybe they have a super stable kind of wind.

Germany is a net-exporter of electricity to France. Especially in summer when nuclear reactors have to be shut down, because the water temperature in the streams they use already is too high or when the tide is too low, or in winter when the rivers freeze.

They export cheap wind-generated power to Norway when the wind is blowing, and import it back for a higher price when it isn't.

Norway has a lot of hydro which they used the revenues from North Sea oil to install. (Their geography and population density also helps.)

"This article is a list of countries and territories by electricity generation from renewable sources every year. Note that most countries import and/or export electricity, so the percentage figures do not reflect the percentage of consumption that is renewable based. "

Increasingly, nations are analyzing their grid requirements and concluding that 100% renewables is feasible, the baseload concept ends up being a constraining requirement that nuclear plants levy upon the rest of a future grid design.

Are any of those nations comparable in both population and land mass to the US?

As the Texas power outage demonstrated, the US grid is not monolithic. Having more interconnected regional grids actually makes it easier to get individual regions to high renewable percentages while allowing the market to continue to mature lower cost storage. Storage is slightly behind the solar manufacturing S-curve in terms of dropping costs, but once a number of EV supply plants start ramping up, I think that cost optimization will strongly drop storage costs.

Is there a reason to believe that a solution that works on the scale of a reasonably sized country suddenly stops working on the scale of a tight federation of states or comparable size?

Here in Sweden we have a date when nuclear plants will be gone. We got a date for when internal combustion engines will be gone from the roads. We have a plan for when the sum of green exports of energy will exceed that of total consumption of energy.

We do not have a date for when fossil fuels will be removed from the energy grid. No date, no plan, no strategy, nothing. What we do have is three distinct plans in order to address the stability problem from renewables.

1: Continuing subsidize fossil fuel plants to operate in ready mode for when demands exceeds that of renewables. Oil for now, natural gas in the future.

2: Expand the ability to buy fossil fueled energy from nearby countries for which we sell our green energy. One can pretend that the import of dirty energy does not exist if the total amount of green export over a year is higher than the import.

3: Future technology that does not exist yet and tend to change from year to year based on what currently sounds like interesting-but-decades-from-being-invested-in tech. This year it is wind to hydrogen in dedicated ocean windfarms with massive pipelines of hydrogen, burned in retrofitted natural gas power plants. It has the upside that more natural gas power plants (and pipelines for natural gas) can be built in the pretense that at some later date we can use that wind produced hydrogen if it ever get built.

The result is investments and subsidies goes to mix of renewables and fossil fuels, which is a far cry from 100% renewables.

https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/Coun...

I am reminded of the quote attributed to Arthur C Clarke.

If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

There are scientists and engineers who say getting to a 100% renewable grid is possible.

Theoretically, yes.

With enough batteries and 2x-3x power production over demand you can have 100% renewable grid.

It might require to cut amazon forest and cover it with solar panels, but possible, yes.

One does not need 2-3x average power production over average demand. With some combination of transmission, batteries, and (importantly) hydrogen storage, the overcapacity and curtailment needed can be quite modest.

Is it possible to create enough gas powered power plants and hydrogen storage facilities to have 100% of a nations capacity running for several weeks during the winter? Yes. Can it all be generated from ocean based windfarms with pipelines? Yes. Will it be cheap? No.

Just the production side, the cost in a 2019 study put the numbers around $7-9 per kg of hydrogen. This does not take into the account the cost of the pipeline, the storage facility, or the gas powered power plant. Remember that return of investment only occurs when demands actually exceeds that of cheaper renewable production, unless government steps in and adds subsidies like it does today with oil.

Is massive amounts of hydrogen a cheaper and safer alternative to nuclear? Given the lack of commercial built and operated hydrogen wind farms I suspect the answer is no on the commercial side. On the safety side it would be interesting to hear about operating large liquid hydrogen pipelines and storage facilities.

> Will it be cheap? No.

Any energy system large enough to power the world will be a very expensive thing. Fortunately, the world economy is also a very large thing, and can pay for it.

We can say with some confidence that while this renewable energy system will be expensive, it will be less expensive than a nuclear energy system that serves the same purpose, and likely cheaper than a system with any substantial amount of nuclear energy.

> Given the lack of commercial built and operated hydrogen wind farms

This is a completely bogus argument in an environment where natural gas is still plentiful and legal and its carbon largely untaxed. The CO2 tax needed to get to wind farms + hydrogen being competitive is likely much less than the CO2 needed to get nuclear to be competitive (against natural gas).

With renewables your base load comes from stored power or potentially trade; that is, connecting Americas to Africa or Asia.

As long as you are able to scale your storage, you'll be able to fill it up with solar energy.

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