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Comment by eloff | Hacker News Reader

I'll turn that around and ask specifically why that's not possible.

It would require a better interconnected grid, overbuilt renewables, and plenty of storage with some level of on demand generation like gas. A good percentage of baseload power like hydro and nuclear certainly help, but it's not required.

It's just a matter of how much are you willing to spend as opposed to something that's physically impossible.

I believe renewables + grid scale batteries are already cheaper than new nuclear and much lower risk and much faster to deploy. The momentum is in favor of widening that gap.

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Currently power storage is tiny, even largest hydropower projects would be insufficient to provide backup power in most places.

And just 2x renewables overbuilt would regularly run below demands - sadly solar/wind is not acting on demand. And during drought also hydropower may be unable to work.

And in most places hydropower, geothermal is unable to provide enough power.

(please correct me if I am wrong! But last time I checked nearly no place can run on renewables without relying on importing fossil-based power, and places that succeed have ideal places for hydropower/geothermal)

The big unknown to me here is the impact of the interconnects. It's obvious that the intermittency problem gets smaller with better transmission infrastructure. What I can't recall seeing is actual studies of how much transmission capacity would be needed to average the renewable input over large enough an area so that existing storage solutions are adequate.

Also, not all renewables are intermittent. Apart from hydro, geothermal comes to mind. (Although with climate change-induced changes in rainfall it's not clear that hydro will be reliable on the timescales we talk about either....)

> renewables + grid scale batteries are already cheaper than new nuclear

I wish this were true, but it’s not. There aren’t competitive grid scale batteries.

I think this is a question of what is grid scale. Is the Tesla facility in Australia grid scale? Why not? What about the large facilities being planned currently with lithium ion batteries?

My source for my previous comment is Bill gates’ book.

Aside, I think a big battery in Australia makes a lot of sense because they have lots of sun year round and lots of unused space. So you are pretty much just storing for night time and can easily build solar panels.

In many other places, you have to store for much longer term which means you need much bigger batteries (and bigger generating plants).

This is to say I think the cost in a place like Australia may be 100s of times less than places in most of the USA (which is where I live).

> In many other places, you have to store for much longer term.

Yeah, that doesn't make sense. Overbuild and interconnect rather.

You can't do things like store summer solar energy for the winter. But there are plenty of places in the US where the sun is nearly always shining. If you can share that energy across the county you're in good shape. Likewise with the wind.

Again it helps you have solid baseload power. It's just nuclear is so expensive and takes so long to build that you can build twice the capacity in solar and wind plus a battery, plus a gas plant for a backup in less time and for a similar price.

I don’t think you can interconnect over very long distances. I know of experimental projects, but nothing proven

There are five existing transmission lines in the world of 2000km and up (all in Brazil and China.)

I think a cross USA interconnect is within the reach of current technology.

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