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Comment by xenocyon | Hacker News Reader

It's important to remember that electricity isn't an energy source, it's an energy medium. This seems trivial, but seems to be a blind spot for people who, for instance, try to set up comparison between electricity and fossil fuels. The comparison doesn't make sense when one is an energy source and the other merely a medium.

Generating electricity is a bit of a misnomer, because it's more about repackaging energy than creating it. Again, this is trivial but easy to lose sight of. The important question is: what's the energy source?

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Install solar on everyone's roofs. Subsidize it with money from property taxes. Make it mandatory for owners of rented buildings, and mandatory for businesses. That alone will easily meet all our projected energy requirements for quite a while.

lol no it won't. This is a horrible oversimplification. Solar panels can only offset some energy requirements for a limited time in certain climates. Even if you were to install batteries in every home, the cost is monumental, battery supply is limited and you lose the economy of scale.

It’s the future actually.

https://www.tesla.com/en_au/support/energy/savpp-faqs (South Australia Virtual Power Plant FAQs)

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/teslas-australian-virtual-p... (Tesla's Australian virtual power plant propped up grid during coal outage)

> Once complete, the VPP will include 50,000 houses fitted with 5 kW rooftop solar systems and 13.5 kWh Tesla batteries. Together, they will be capable of delivering up to 250 MW of solar power and 650 MWh of energy storage.

> So far, less than 1,000 homes have been completed. Still, the aggregated storage was able to make a difference.

With regards to Australian rooftop solar potential, it’s estimated at almost 179GW, roughly a bit more than 3.5x total current Australian generation capacity.

What’s the ratio on a GWhr/year basis? 3.5x the peak power seems like it could easily be less on a total energy basis.

Looking here, it seems like 1 GWp in Australia can yield around 1500GWh/year. A conventional plant running just 20 hours per day yields 7300 Wh/Wp/yr.

https://www.solarchoice.net.au/blog/how-much-energy-will-my-...

I think the problem is that much energy policy originates from california, which has a relatively mild climate.

Additionally in california, peak energy demand seems to be when the sun is very strong in the summer, so solar power matches very well with air conditioning load.

The rest of the united states has weather, so situations like the-dead-of-winter + no-sunshine might be a better fit for fossil fuels.

I don't think the person you are replying to had a good plan, but solar definitely could offset the energy consumed by cars. The average car will only consume ~12KWh per day. Even a small 3-4KW system can do that.

Yes, its an oversimplification, but in a world where the problem is all the electric cars, you also have rolling battery buffers available whenever you want them.

We already use hot water heaters and air conditioners in a similar way. Peak shaving with people's home charging setups wouldn't be hard to add.

In normal times, my electric car is almost never at home when the sun is shining on my solar panels.

So you feed the power to the grid and the grid charges your car at work.

If they had controlled COVID early enough the economic losses could have quite possibly allowed for everyone to have solar already.

As of Jan 1, 2020 California has come very close to these requirements. Most new construction residences (with a few exceptions) must have enough solar generation equipment to meet 100% of the buildings electrical needs.

Then we have a huge surplus of energy during the day and a huge deficit at night. What then?

Send it back into the grid. Charge cars. Feed industries that need daytime power. Pay the owners back for it, or give them free night-time electricity in returns. Heat up some high heat capacity goo, or hell even water, and use that to heat your apartment during cold nights in desert weather.

If you still have surplus after all that, mine bitcoin and use it to fund battery research, environmental initiatives, fund education, fund healthcare.

Surpluses are never a problem.

This is basically a pipe dream unless people radically change the way they consume power.

Peak energy consumption is typically around dusk, so driven primarily by home consumption not industry. Convince people not to use air conditioners after 4pm and maybe we would be able to match supply to demand.

Moreover, even if we all started sitting in our hot dark houses after work we'd still have an extremely variable supply which would mean more robust infrastructure to transmit less overall power.

Hence solar, which generates until sunset, paired with ~4 hours of storage, which carries the grid through peak evening load until most folks are off to bed and grid load declines rapidly.

https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/confronting-duck-curve-... (https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/styles/full_artic... for this illustrated; batteries replace the natural gas ramp)

https://youtu.be/P_d0x8uG6kE

And then it's a rainy day and everybody stays home from work because there's no power? Or we spin up a bunch of dirty natural gas?

This also doesn't address the seasonal changes in supply. We're realistically talking about creating energy infrastructure (and then maintaining it) that ulaverages maybe 20% capacity.

I just feel like solar proponents like to completely ignore the very real unsolved issues because solar+batteries is tidy if you don't think too much about it.

Natural gas fired peaker plants will continue to be a crucial part of our electrical system indefinitely. They allow generation to be rapidly spun up and down to stabilize the grid; other generation sources can't react as quickly, or sometimes can't react at all. And natural gas isn't very dirty.

Free night-time electricity from where? You need to generate it from somewhere or store it. It just doesn't magically appear...

Solar in large scale will be fun. Essentially at peak production it will have zero price or potentially negative price... And then during night you need to generate it from somewhere and pay premium... I wonder would it be actually cheaper soon not to have solar and just get it for free during day and then pay same during dark times...

How much energy do you think would be required to air source sequester all of carbon we’ve emitted into the atmosphere over the last 100 years? I don’t believe we have any shortage of demand for electricity, and loads will be structured to accommodate variable generation (this is typically referred to as demand response).

Wind, especially if you're in the Great Plains or connected by HVDC transmission lines to the Great Plains.

https://windexchange.energy.gov/maps-data/325

https://www.volts.wtf/p/transmission-fortnight-burying-power

"If you still have surplus after all that, mine bitcoin and use it to fund"

Or maybe use it to power factories that make hundred dollar bills?

Sorry, but Bitcoin does not create a net increase in value for all the energy dumped into it. As you described it, it is simply an elaborate way to waste resources.

Don't mine Bitcoin then, run GPU farms and rent them out to AI researchers.

Point is, surplus isn't really an issue.

Lower the price of electricity when there is a surplus, and people and industry will figure out a way to use it, including charging batteries.

This is really the natural solution - economic forces do figure things out.

I do wonder about situations like the recent texas fiasco. Maybe we want something like "cheaper at night" not pure economic nonsense like "$9,000/kwh for the next 15 minutes"

Will it? Certainly in my part of the country most structures cannot go off-grid on solar alone, even with significant storage. Hard to make it up on volume.

> Make it mandatory for owners of rented buildings, and mandatory for businesses.

So my grandmother, who gets a large part of her retirement income from a couple of $5-600/mo rental homes she owns will have to shell out 10-20k each to keep doing that? On what planet does that make sense?

Subsidize it 100% for her and low income rental owners then.

For the high income armchair landlords, impose a solar tax and fund solar installations for everyone else.

I want to think about how to make stuff possible, not excuses about why we can't do it. This kind of excuse-making attitude is why the US is falling behind in climate efforts.

Shouldn't need to subsidize it. The idea is that your $x PV install will generate enough income to make it a worthwhile investment.

If that’s the case, the mandate is equally unnecessary.

It obviously is. People will install solar panels in bad locations (for solar) because of the mandate.

Is that outcome a good thing in some way that I’m not seeing? Because to me, that just seems wasteful. (For society I mean; it’s obvious how it’s a good thing for makers and installers of PV systems.)

they have to use the whole climate change narrative as a reason to push renewables, because it doesn't make economic sense.

Well yes, because scientifically speaking we're fucked if we don't do something, and the current iteration of the economy incentivizes short-sighted thinking, not long-term survival and avoidance of unrest due to a resource crisis.

It makes economic sense. Damage caused by CO2 pollution doesn't make economic sense.

The anti climate change narrative also fuels macroeconomic problems as the willingness for the US to invest into its own nation decreases for no logical reason or gain.

There is nothing virtuous about being dependent on fossil fuel imports.

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