Comment by gnicholas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gnicholas | Hacker News Reader

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I am curious to know how this analysis factors in the need for storage of wind/solar for periods when it is not windy/sunny. When I looked through the report, I only saw this.

> We are already seeing combined renewables-plus-storage plants win competitive solicitations and capture some of this value in high solar-and wind-potential regions (empirically, this appears to add roughly $4-8/MWh to renewable energy costs). We expect the trend to continue as battery prices slide down the learning curve.

My interpretation is that wind/solar plus storage is more expensive, which undercuts competitiveness outside of the most windy/sunny locations. I am as excited as anyone about new developments in storage technology, but it seems like it's still a significant challenge.

Was it discussed elsewhere, or is anyone else aware of other information regarding the combined cost? It seems like this one statement somewhat undermines the conclusion, unless I'm missing something.

Even where coal is competitive, it’s still more expensive than nat gas in pretty much every environment. And of course when talking about coal you should probably price in health and environmental externalities of the combustion alone.

A long term problem is that in remote areas of the high latitudes — Alaska, Nunavut, Siberia — fossil fuels are the only reasonable energy where geothermal isn’t available. It’s a good thing fusion is only 20 years away.

Yeah but we can afford to have them burn fossil fuels until the end of time, their population is relatively tiny.

I think that depends on what happens with plastics. If the rest of the economy moves away from petrochemical extraction, fossil fuels become scarce. You’ll still get methane from landfills, of course, but SpaceX needs it too. We can afford it environmentally but I can easily see hydrocarbons tripling in price.

If we stop using plastics, the existing oil wells don't magically disappear. We can use it for fuel, and it should be cheaper, because there's less competition for it.

Not if the regulatory environment becomes very unfavorable to oil. Cheaper is another way of saying less profitable. If you’re not selling as much, all of that infrastructure for hydrocarbon processing becomes more expensive to maintain. An oil well doesn’t give you fuel, it gives you crude which goes through a pipeline which goes to a refinery to split fuel, plastic ingredients, and tar. Then the fuel must be transported. And you have to operate the oil well, but water, and then the well eventually runs dry.

People don’t really like wells near them, nor do the like the waste water from hydraulic fracking. Without a big industry to back it up, people will want to ban oil extraction.

All of which is to say that supply and demand only go so far when an industry collapses from lack of demand. Look at camera film. Shouldn’t it be cheaper because no one is buying it and it’s a niche product? Nope, the economies of scale no longer work.

> It’s a good thing fusion is only 20 years away.

Is it? This sounds exciting. Can you say more?

It's just an old "joke", fusion has been 20 years away for the last 40 years or something like that.

The Sparc/Arc project in the US

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=mit+sparc+denni...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC_(tokamak)

and the STEP project in the UK

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_Tokamak_for_Energy_P...

Both are very promising, and unlike all previous experiments, if their core design goals are met they would quickly lead to commercialization, quite plausibly within 20 years.

(Chemical) hydrogen will be available much sooner than fusion. We should see a lot of hydrogen related infrastructure being deployed soon.

This is sarcasm right? Hydrogen isn't a source of energy its a storage mechanism that has to be produced using fossil fuels or electricity, and you don't get more energy out of it than it takes to produce it.

Yes, but you can create it during one part of the year and store it for other parts of the year. It is going to be a viable replacement for fossil fuels for northern climates long before nuclear fusion happens.

Storing half a year's worth of hydrogen? That seems... improbable to be viable any time soon.

One option is to combine it with other elements providing long-term stable fuel stores.

Carbon is one such atom.

https://old.reddit.com/r/energy/comments/22gryt/seawater_pow...

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/22k71x/us_navy...

Fischer-Tropsh (creating synthetic analogues of petrol, kerosene/jet fuel, or diesel), or Sabatier process (creating alcohol) are two options.

Yes, it's a net energy sink. You're trading cheap surplus electricity for high-density, long-term storable, stable, dispatchable thermal fuel.

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/06/16/hydrogen-storage-in-s...

You can store hydrogen in underground salt caverns. We could store years' worth of energy demand.

As I understand it, grid batteries are now cheap enough, but there just aren't enough of them yet. We don't have the industry to produce batteries at that scale. At least not, yet! As more grid scale batteries come online and demand rises we should see some impressive production numbers soon.

However in the meantime I think we'll see some odd results as older infrastructure decays and no one wants to invest in fossil fuel plants that will be obsolete in less than 40 years.

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