California to open five natural gas plants to avoid blackouts | Hacker News Reader

California to open five natural gas plants to avoid blackouts

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44 pointsericdanielski100 comments

Well meaning goals resulting in hell keening outcomes.. Baseload should be handled by nuclear. Excess and spikes- should be renewable and storage.

Yup, we still can't do base load on solar or wind power. Unless you're lucky geographically, nuclear is the best option.

That’s false. Many solar power plants already include ~“4h” of maximum output via batteries. Currently it’s used for peaking power in the evenings. However, that’s ~50% of their daily output. As grid demand is higher in the day that means at scale they could provide 100% grid power 24/7.

Giant 3h system “400 MW of solar energy and store up to 1200 MWh of energy“: https://www.tdworld.com/distributed-energy-resources/energy-...

Example of using that for peak demand: https://www.reutersevents.com/renewables/pv-insider/giant-or...

To be clear a 4GW PV instillation would be 4GW * 4h or 16GWh. That 4GW produces ~30% of maximum output per day or 4GW * 0.3 * 24h = 28.8GWh per day. 28.8GWh - 16GWh = 12GWh after charging batteries. So for ~10h you get 1.2 GW with surplus charging batteries, and for the other ~14 you get 1.14GW.

You have ruffled many feathers…

If there was as supraconducting pipeline for current, could a solar receiving part of the planet, send power to a part that is already in shade?

Similarly, what is the present feasibility of energy transmission via laser using satellites?

We’re at the prototypes and proof of concept stage for that sort of thing.

Optimistically, it’s just about possible in principle if you don’t mind paying SpaceX to expand by a few orders of magnitude. But I don’t think anyone will be very happy with even one gigawatt of orbital lasers, no matter how much the satellite owner insists (possibly even accurately and with reference to the laws of physics) that it can’t be turned into a death ray.

(And if you can use beamed power safely from orbit, with emphasis on safely, why not use the same beamed power horizontally at ground level around the world? Power at night from space implies an orbital-to-ground distance comparable to planetary radius).

Every foil wrapped turd in space is in theory a kinetic impactor by value of location and acceleration.

There was a scifi short story, were a system was wrecked, aeons after a war, by what was essentially missed shots.

This is what makes the expanse so creepy. Every PDC round not finding a target- finds a target eventually. On the other side of the system, totally not intended, but it finds one. Even thinks doing the marathon with ion-engines can become lethally over time.

Voyager is another systems bullet.

Probably not. Super conductors don't really solve any problem because they loose their super conductivity at high B fields; i.e. when they transport large currents. Case in point the highest field magnets are not made w/ superconductors but water cooled copper pipes.

So you'd have to transform the electricity to high voltage, low current. But we already do that to pretty much arbitrarily lower Ωlosses on high V lines - the USSR made a transcontinental line back in the sixties with MV (yup, mega volts).

Could be done, question is the cost (and possibly global production of superconductors: I hear recent increases in fusion experiments are due to a recent increase in superconductor availability, but that in turn implies global production is pretty low). There is a plan for a 5 GW superconducting connection, but AFAIK the ones which have actually been built are in the megawatt range: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tres_Amigas_SuperStation

In the article the batteries max power output is 30 MW

It represents less than 10% of the max power output of the plant (380 MW)

When I read "The battery section will provide four hours of storage capacity at full discharge" I understand that it will provide 4h x 30MW = 120 MWh of energy. Do you understand it as 4h x 380 MW = 1520 MWh of energy ?

[EDIT] From other source [1] it seems my interpretation is the correct one: "The onsite battery storage facility will be capable of providing 30MW of continuous power for four hours."

That completely changes the narrative: the total energy the battery storage can deliver by itself is less than what the solar + wind provides at full power in half an hour. Also, this amount of energy will be delivered at a peak power of less than 10% than the peak power of Solar + Wind

[1]: https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/projects/wheatridge-renewab...

The first article is an example of what I am talking about, I linked to the second one to make it clear they don’t currently release battery power at night.

Anyway, I think it’s reasonable to think in terms of “50 MW of PV solar and 30 MW * 4h of battery storage” + a wind farm because they normally charge batteries from solar via DC to avoid DC>AC>DC losses. But it might be a true hybrid system.

If you edited your comment (I did not see first article mentioned), please show it with some kind of flag. Otherwise it can make the thread confusing

If it rains for a week?

The pithy answer is “That’s why people build them in deserts.” However, electric grids need excess capacity spread across large areas for when demand spikes and stuff breaks. Luckily peak demand doesn’t line up with wide scale rain as AC demand falls.

Also, PV unlike concentrated solar does produce power during storms it’s just significantly less than normal.

Reminder that other "low value energy demand" is easy bufferable - one can easy heat water in a isolated ground tank with excess solar and use that storage in winter.

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

Hydro power is renewable and can handle base load. Until you run out of water, which is what's happening here.

Hydro is the best option next to nuclear (more dangerous as accidents can and do kill thousands but potentially cheaper), but the number of feasible sites is rather limited - mountains with river canyons that are not used otherwise and can be dammed are probably all dammed already and have been for half a century...

> Baseload should be handled by nuclear.

Nuclear is already a bad idea under normal circumstances, given that no country has a long-term solution for dealing with the waste, molten-salt reactors are vaporware (usually because it turns out molten salts are highly aggressive) and fusion has been "it's ready in a decade!!!" for like, what, half a century now. And that doesn't even take stuff like "who, other than the taxpayer, will foot the bill for tearing the reactors down" or "who, other than the taxpayer, picks up the tab in the case of an accident" and other financial questions. Nuclear is only "cheaper" because these side effects get conveniently ignored!

But it is an especially dumb idea in California with its earthquake fault lines. Have two large reactor accidents not proven by now that nuclear fission is extremely unsafe?

How many deaths from nuclear accidents? How many deaths from cancer, lung disease, heart disease from pollution from fossil fuel?

We need to get away from both fossil and nuclear fuels as soon as possible, neither is acceptable any more.

The solutions are pretty clear: solar, wind, tidal/other water potential energy, battery backed storage and gas peaker plants (as these can be retrofitted to burn synthetic gas and are the cleanest technology of fossil energy that we have). And especially: a grid that has enough capacity to distribute power across continents.

" a grid that has enough capacity to distribute power across continents."

That's easy to write, but very hard to envision the scale. The grid transports very small fraction of the consumed power over large distances, most of the power gets consumed along the way. But what you are proposing involves transmitting all the power that a far away community consumes several time zones away

> That's easy to write, but very hard to envision the scale.

We have this in Europe ffs. Almost all of Europe, parts of Asia (Turkey) and North Africa (Morocco, Algeria, Tunesia) run in a synchronized-phase grid, and we have interconnection links to the insular ones (UK, Nordic countries, and a small one tying us to Russia). The entire former Soviet Union runs on a synchronized-phase grid.

America is the only developed country / large geographic area that does not run a single synchronized-phase grid.

> most of the power gets consumed along the way

Nope. Germany averages about 6% of transmission loss ("Netzverluste"): https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Branchen-Unternehmen/Energ...

Sorry let me re-phrase

"Nope. Germany averages about 6% of transmission loss"

I wasn't referring to ohmic losses, or transmission losses. I was referring to consumed along the way. The power generated in Vladivostok doesn't reach Germany not because the line losses are real, but because there'a country of 150 million inbetween.

"We have this in Europe ffs. Almost all of Europe, parts of Asia (Turkey) and North Africa (Morocco, Algeria, Tunesia) run in a synchronized-phase grid, and we have interconnection links to the insular ones (UK, Nordic countries, and a small one tying us to Russia). The entire former Soviet Union runs on a synchronized-phase grid"

Indeed you do (and there's problems with that), and it's not the impressive frankly (N. America has the same, with HVDC interconnects). But the OP was (clearly?) suggesting transporting all the power needed in Europe in, say, the Gobi desert. That's a scale of grid capacity that you do not have.

> Indeed you do (and there's problems with that)

Which ones? Our grid is extremely resilient - the last major customer-visible nation-wide outage was in 2006 when a mistake during the shutdown of a power line for the crossing of a ship underneath led to a failure cascade. Meanwhile, the US has outage reports every few months, including such absurdities as rolling outages to prevent wildfires from shoddy unmaintained networks. Or the shit that went down in Texas, which refuses interconnections to avoid federal regulations.

> But the OP was (clearly?) suggesting transporting all the power needed in Europe in, say, the Gobi desert. That's a scale of grid capacity that you do not have.

We don't need a grid powerful enough to shift all the power around, as we have plenty of local renewable electricity from various sources. For the rest? Italy is planning to build a new submarine interconnect to Tunisia (https://www.derstandard.de/story/2000121873523/italiens-netz...), sized enough to transport energy towards Northern Europe.

"Which ones?"

Cascading failures. Those are very effectively blocked by power islands connected by HVDC lines (like Texas is). A power outage like the North East in 2003 is unlikely in Europe because of your mild weather being unlikely to put your infrastructure to the test.

"the last major customer-visible nation-wide outage was in 2006 [...]."

You're comparing Germany (?) to the US more than six times as populous and far larger in extent and far lower density? The last outage that impacted me in my corner of my continent was back in 2003.

Europe literally has the most benign weather on Earth. Barely any tornados. Barely any hurricanes. Barely any Blizzards. Heck you don't even have good thunderstorms - trust me, I grew up in Europe, there's no good thunderstorms there.

"Meanwhile, the US has outage reports every few months, including such absurdities as rolling outages to prevent wildfires from shoddy unmaintained networks. Or the shit that went down in Texas, which refuses interconnections to avoid federal regulations."

You really have little appreciation of the scale of California and Texas. Cali is 30% larger than Germany, twice as long, with taller mountains, little to no water, and full of combustible material.

Texas' outage had nothing to do with its interconnections. A rare weather event froze the gas pipelines at the same time they were supposed to pick up the slack from derated renewable generations. Texas' neighbors had no electricity to give (and in fact, the neighbors complained that Texas stopped exporting power - Texas IS connected to the rest of N. America).

Now, you could point out that Texas should have been better prepared for rare weather. I agree. So should have the Rhine Valley Region.

Solar has killed more people in California than nuclear energy.

Deep core drilling is an easy solution, but solutions are not being developed because waste is not actually that much of a problem. Decommissioning is one, though.

> no country has a long-term solution for dealing with the waste

Sure we do. Stick it somewhere dry and remote. Thanks to climate change, brought on in part by anti-nuclear activists, we’ll have plenty of both well into the future.

> Stick it somewhere dry and remote.

The only thing that will attract is terrorists. No matter how remote, "dirty bombs" are a real threat. And in densely populated Europe, we don't have the luxury of such places at all.

> Thanks to climate change, brought on in part by anti-nuclear activists

Sorry, what? Climate change has been brought on by fossil fuel companies:

- 20 companies are responsible for a third of all historic emissions: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/09/revealed...

- BP is the inventor of the "individual carbon footprint", inarguably one of the most devious PR campaigns that moved "responsibility" from the government to individual people so that the fossil fuel industry could make money without problems: https://mashable.com/feature/carbon-footprint-pr-campaign-sh...

- hotly contested, but fossil fuel companies may have had a hand in the decline of public transportation systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

- not to mention the countless "donations", bribes and other lobbying efforts from the industry to politics over the last 50 years that made sure that cars were prioritized and emissions controls weakened (the latter only ended with the Dieselgate scandal).

> And in densely populated Europe, we don't have the luxury of such places at all

All the nuclear waste of Europe could go in a building that's about one hectare. Yet there is enough place for both ten thousands of hectares of open pit coal mines, and hundreds of hectares of totally unprotected and open-air ash ponds containing toxic sludge that is guaranteed to more dangerous to your health - and sometimes also more radioactive - than just about any nuclear reactor waste.

Face it, the "Green" movement in Germany which has lobbied to replace nuclear power with wind/solar in the last decade (instead of replacing coal with renewables and nukes) are responsible for gigatons of carbon emissions and will be rightly vilified by future generations.

Well there are breeder reactors that significantly transform waste to less harmful products, and the Russians have basically commercialized them.

But they're still a bad idea. Nuclear waste implies a strong, competent, and stable state that is able to secure it for millennia. Fifteen years ago when I arrived to the US the Americans I spoke of couldn't conceive their hegemony collapsing or the US state becoming incompetent.

This, I think, is the strongest argument against (current) nuclear power - in time it appears that all regimes collapse, geographic areas fall into anarchy and chaos. Human society simply doesn't have the proven long term stability to secure nuclear power.

You're aware also that storage of all the nuclear waste produced since the beginning of nuclear power to today would require a remarkably small amount of space, which even in conditions of political turmoil (when are conditions not in some state of turmoil, often far worse than today?) is far from as hard to find as you're painting it with your fearful idea of all governments collapsing "eventually".

Specifically, for the U.S at least, in 2018, there were just over 80,000 metric tonnes of high-level waste that have been generated since the 1950's to now, all capable of fitting inside a single football field to a depth of just under 10 meters, and no more than 400,000 tonnes globally. That's pretty much all of it so far (sources: https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/P1799_web.pdf, https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-... ). Between 1971 and 2018, nuclear reactors in the USA generated 3000 GW-years of electricity to make their 80,000 tonnes.

Also, given the average density of most spent nuclear fuel, 80,000 or even 400,000 tonnes is not a tremendous physical volume to find some safe place for in the largely stable countries where most of it has been produced for many decades. There are far more immediately dangerous substances and objects in much less stable storage conditions all over the world (small arms, conventional explosives, landmines, toxic chemicals we have no way of not producing etc) that should warrant far more concern for the deaths they could or even do already cause per ton of weight....

Also, to debunk a few general misconceptions about storing nuclear waste. Yes the source has a certain bias, but it delivers well-reasoned points and offers sources of its own: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...

Ok, look, I'd rather not talk about "football fields 10 meters deep". But going by that number your 80 000 metric tonnes of spent fuel has an average density of 740kg/m^3. So does your football field include the empty space necessary to keep the rods far apart (to keep them cool and not critical)?

But never-mind the technicalities, you cannot dismiss the geo-political implications. We have barely existed as a species in the time length nuclear waste decays. We have only 5000 years or so of statehood, the vast majority of them since collapsed.

Unless you propose burying the waste in the Marianna trench (I think there is merit there), I really need to see the stability concerns addressed.

EDIT: And yes, I am "aware". I stated my undergrad in a nuclear eng program, and switched to physics after a few courses. I still have friends in the industry and to say morale is low is an understatement.

> So does your football field include the empty space necessary to keep the rods far apart

If you are "aware" you might know that 99% of nuclear waste is low-level (contaminated hospital waste, rags, paper) or intermediate-level (cladding, concrete or chemicals from decommissioned reactors that are irradiated). These will never go critical. Even high-level radioactive waste doesn't go critical because the hot parts are either (a) valuable and get reprocessed into new fuel or (b) have short half lives and decay within a few month in the spent fuel pool of the power plants before being shipped away.

Yes, I am aware of the difference between high and low level fuel and the stew of different half lives of the constituents of higher level fuel.

There's 47 k tones of high level waste in the US alone [1].So I think it's fair to assume that your 80 000 tonnes world wide was high level waste.

Which has to be kept far apart from each other since they decay and at the very least generate heat. Therefore, apartness is an integral part of repository design. Yucca Mountain has a capacity for 70 000 tonnes. That is, its not big enough to store the world's waste despite nuclear power having a small fraction of the overall worldwide power production over the last 60 years.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_radioactive_waste_m...

It’s fission, not fusion. The only fusion reactor in use is the one in the sky.

Nuclear has externalities. But carbon-based has much more.

You mention solar panels. What are the externalities of those? Lots of harsh chemicals go into batteries, and we need a buttload of batteries to make solar work at scale.

We don’t have a foolproof plan for long term storage of nuclear waste. But we have no plan at all for longterm storage of CO2 or battery/solar panel chemicals.

Regarding the accidents, I can only assume you mean Three Mile Island and Chernobyl or perhaps the Japanese tsunami. If you look into it a bit more you’ll notice that those were technologically ancient reactors.

Japan had several reactors - some with the older design, some more modern. They all got hit by a massive tsunami, much more than the design spec called for. The old ones leaked. The modern ones shut down safely, exactly as planned.

Anti-nuclear = anti-science

> It’s fission, not fusion.

Fixed the typo, thanks.

> You mention solar panels. What are the externalities of those? Lots of harsh chemicals go into batteries, and we need a buttload of batteries to make solar work at scale.

Battery production in itself isn't as toxic as you make it out to be.

> But we have no plan at all for longterm storage of CO2 or battery/solar panel chemicals.

Long term CO2 storage has an easy concept: trees. Solar panels can easily be recycled these days - they are mostly glass - and battery recycling efforts are already underway, they should be at mass scale once the problem becomes relevant (since even used electric car batteries can have a long second life as decentral storage units).

> Regarding the accidents, I can only assume you mean Three Mile Island and Chernobyl or perhaps the Japanese tsunami. If you look into it a bit more you’ll notice that those were technologically ancient reactors.

Most reactors in operation today are ancient reactors, new constructions (Flamanville!) are plagued by cost and time overruns that put the infamous BER airport to shame, and possibly-new constructions (MSRs) are a pipe dream and/or have plutonium proliferation concerns.

> They all got hit by a massive tsunami, much more than the design spec called for.

California is deemed way overdue for a big earthquake (per https://www.cbsnews.com/news/california-earthquake-drought-o... and others). It is a really, really bad idea to build a nuclear plant anywhere close.

Renweables and nuclear don't mix well - it's too inflexible. In fact, the concept of base load generally becomes very unhelpful with an energy sector transitioning towards renewable energy (see e.g. https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.18...).

Overbuilding generation capacity, either of renewables or here by peaker gas plants, rather than storage is generally recognised as the most economical way forward.

There are 14 GW of installed solar power in California as of now [1]. These new gas plants will total 150 MW, so about 1% of the solar power generation.

[1] https://ww2.energy.ca.gov/almanac/renewables_data/solar/inde...

Would have been easier to just not shut down that nuclear power plant in the first place…

Shut down nuclear power -> +5 virtue points.

Spin up gas power plants to solve an actual problem -> -2 virtue points, less if you can deflect the blame elsewhere.

See why they did it this way? Government decision making is absolutely riddled with this kind of crap.

The San Onofre plant was shut down because the replacement reactor that was installed was defective and unsafe to operate, and repairing it wasn't worth the expense. They didn't shut it down for funsies.

>repairing it wasn't worth the expense

The alternative being mothballing an energy source when you're in an energy supply crisis.

The “expense” you mention is just getting plastered all over ratepayers in CA as they have to deal with bullshit instability.

Since nobody bothered to read the article: They're installing five 30MW gas generators, which will probably be run a handful of times a year. This provides 1/15 the capacity of the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant and a tiny fraction of california's solar capacity. It's a tiny amount of power/greenhouse gas/whatever, no matter how you look at it.

Nuclear is the best option on paper but a serious look at Fukushima needs to occur and be addressed first. In all discussions about pros and cons Fukushima is conveniently left out of the discussion or drastically minimized.

Fukushima happened. We still do not contain the technology to fully stop the melted reactors. The price tag is in the billions and continues to rise in containment. The geographic loss of land use is massive. Even Chernobyl reactor continues to spew radiation and make the land inhabitable.

Until we can build reactors that can be fully shutdown and contained I think nuclear is still a no go (IMO)

I just see endless back and forth between nuclear vs solar and wind. And I feel like these should all be gathered up and forced to properly address each other's arguments so we can get a better picture of the true pros and cons. I am somehow reminded of the Simpsons episode where the kids race rolling fruit to the front of the bus. Like Ralf I want to proclaim Go Banana and place my bet on fusion

It’s not an A vs B problem, it’s mix optimization problem, because we need baseload, dispatchable, and peaking power sources. So you have to talk about the entire portfolio not sub one for another.

Mostly agree, but I’d say the “Go banana!” option is trying to power the world purely with greater energy efficiency.

The US got incredibly lucky that its quirky combination of land-use rights and geology enabled the natural gas boom during a transition from coal to renewables.

It’s one reason for many shifts like the pull out of Afghanistan and the reduction of emissions immediately after leaving the Paris accord.

If humans are smart, they won’t let natural gas delay the full transition to renewables.

Renewables can’t replace natural gas until we develop effective ways to store the energy for a baseload.

Since we won’t use nuclear power, it’s going to be here for quite some time.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/11/bill-gates-bullish-on-using-...

There are lots of proven ways to store energy for fluctuations in load.

Hydro storage and battery storage have both been proven at scale and battery storage in particular is dropping in price.

Nuclear is very expensive in comparison.

The moving mass batteries are interesting

Interesting technically but not really economically. Gravity is just not a very strong force compared to chemical bonds so you need humongous amounts of mass and a fairly large height difference to store an equivalent amount of energy as a few containers worth of batteries.

There is a reason that even though we've had the technology to make moving mass batteries for decades, the only form of such energy storage in operation today is pumped hydro.

20% of electricity in the United States is from nuclear.

How many more decades before we can replace that with a renewable option?

I’ve watched people like yourself be wrong for 2 decades. I suppose in another 5 decades you might be right.

In the meantime, being wrong has a price as greenhouse emissions increase

I'm not sure which point you think you're refuting. Renewable options are here and are being used and grid storage is a solved problem, though with the current balkanised and underfunded state of the US grid it is unsurprising there are significant ongoing problems there caused by lack of long term investment in infrastructure.

IMO existing nuclear plants should be kept until they can be replaced easily, and the US may well take decades to do so as they are very slow on the uptake. Other countries are doing a lot better, some have reached 100% power from renewables already for short periods of time and are on track to do it for long periods in the coming decades.

Greenhouse emissions are not rising in the US, they are gradually falling as renewable options become cheaper and are built out and EVs spread:

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

I'd expect them to keep falling given transport and electricity generation are the main sources.

Greenhouse gases have fallen in the United States because we have closed a lot of coal power plants and replaced them with natural gas.

Emissions are increasing globally because we are building a lot of coal plants.

The fact remains that we are at least 2 or 3 decades from renewables being able to replace fossil fuels for power generation

That’s half a century of waiting

Not even by your calculations is that half a century of waiting (30 years is not half a century!), but your 'fact' of a 2-3 decade wait are demonstrably wrong and unsupported by the evidence.

Why do you insist on attempting to set renewables and nuclear in opposition?

Scotland for example recently hit generation of 97% of demand from renewables in the year 2020. As part of a larger grid with appropriate balancing and storage, 100% renewables is absolutely doable, and as part of a grid with some base load generated from nuclear (as the US and UK for example already have and is not going away soon), it's definitely doable right now with sufficient will and resources:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-56530424

The only reason the US is trailing so far behind other countries is a lack of will to transition off fossil fuels, a chronic lack of investment in infrastructure and a balkanised electricity grid run for profit, all of which is fixable.

In 20 years the cost of PV installations has decreased a magnitude. Lithium battery energy density has increased a magnitude while prices have fallen a magnitude. Maybe it's time to shift expectations as to what solar can achieve when properly integrated into the existing energy grid.

> How many more decades before we can replace that with a renewable option?

Roughly one. According to Wikipedia, the US added 35 GW of each of PV and wind between 2016 and 2020, and has 95 GW of nuclear. Accounting for capacity factor, the quantity of renewables TWh produced roughly doubled, and is currently 14% vs. 20% for nuclear, but (worldwide at least) renewables are close to an exponential trend.

The main constraint the USA should have here is storage and/or long-distance transmission.

Such is exponential growth.

Though you’re right: needlessly closing nuclear reactors is bad for the environment as the most important problem right now is the CO2. Coal needs to go first, then oil, then natural gas.

> lots of proven ways

None of which work beyond a few hours. The sheer number of batteries and the amount of pumped hydro needed is phenomenal. As one data point, Elon Musk's much heralded $100m battery in South Australia stores a few seconds of Australia's total energy use. A few tenths of a second for the US.

When it is cloudy and there is no wind for a week, renewables are a complete failure.

> is dropping in price

Batteries have been dropping in price for 140 years. But the best batteries have only been getting better at about 7% per year. Specific technologies have improved faster than this early on in their lives (e.g. LiIon) but during most of this improvement they were far from the best.

Hydro has significant issues as well. You need a massive flooded area, displacing many people and animals, and you totally disrupt the downstream ecology of the river. (See the Aswan dam)

It also doesn’t produce a ton of power. The Three Gorges Dam is a colossal project, displaced literally millions, cost a frightful amount of money, and produces 1% of China’s power. Also, if that thing ever breaks, many millions will die.

Should have been a couple of small nuclear plants.

Regarding hydro storage, it’s the same exact thing, except now you need two dams, one high and one low. This isn’t a practical solution everywhere, certainly not at a national scale.

" and produces 1% of China’s power."

It produces 1% of the electricity used by CHINA the premier industrial and most populous country in the world and you dismiss it? Three Gorges was a mistake, but it generates power used by 13 million people. That is a ton of power.

Most gas plants are in the 300 MW size, i.e. the 3GD is about 80 of them.

That China has a lot of consumption is neither here nor there. My point is that they would have to build one hundred of these dams which is clearly totally impractical.

I'm not arguing that 3GD wasn't stupid, just that it generates an insane amount of power.

Either way, no more of them will be built - there are not many more gorges like that left.

That’s my whole point. We can’t power the planet with hydro, nor should we try.

We need heavy-duty nuclear plants for base load, solar for daytime peaks, and probably some natural gas here and there

Or long-distance transmission. I have no idea how much a multi-gigawatt HVDC line costs per kilometre, but the losses are within the realm of at least asking if it can be done — 3.5% per 1,000 km is (0.965^20) = 0.49 ~= 51% loss for 20,000 km, and the cells themselves are cheap enough these days that it’s still often economically viable even if you need twice as many cells.

(Obviously you don’t want to do antipodal HVDC until you need to, because even if the HVDC lines were free, pointless transmission losses are still pointless even if you can afford them).

". I have no idea how much a multi-gigawatt HVDC line costs per kilometre,"

Well there's the crux, ain't it? They're bloody expensive.

Also, to your 3.5% loss / 1000km line loss add in the transformation losses. Then consider that a 20k line must be a DC line (to avoid reflection losses).

Also, why did you use 20k km? Such a curious number, half the world's circumference, that I suspect you mean to propose to wrap the world in power lines to get power at midnight from noon elsewhere

Well 20km for your loss calculations is not nearly enough since you cannot connect two sites in a straight line. For starters the earth' topography won't allow it. But then there's the issue that you won't connect every city to every generating site, but have a hub-spoke model (like ethernet). To give you an idea of the added distance compare the straight line distance of Atlanta to Pittsburgh to the interstate distance (520 mi to 680 mi).

Finally, the proposal of connecting two sites on opposite ends of the earth is fundamentally hegemonist. What are you going to do with the fiercely independent people that tend to live in deserts when they oppose you wallpapering their desert with panels? When the Bedouins of Algeria are blowing up the electricity needed in Japan, will the EU send storm troopers to punish the locals?

> Also, to your 3.5% loss / 1000km line loss add in the transformation losses.

Which is going to be a fixed amount regardless of distance? While I don’t have the numbers, I would expect HVDC to be a dead end already if it made a difference to my conclusion.

> 20k km? Such a curious number, half the world's circumference, that I suspect you mean to propose to wrap the world in power lines to get power at midnight from noon elsewhere

Indeed, though this is likely excessive: summer/winter is significantly harder for storage to deal with — and hence the mostly likely to be solved with transmission — than day/night, given most people sleep at night but nobody hibernates though winter.

> But then there's the issue that you won't connect every city to every generating site, but have a hub-spoke model (like ethernet)

Surely a web is the best topology? Existing grids don’t all run on hub-and-spoke models: https://openinframap.org/#2/19.82/13.02/L,P,S

> When the Bedouins of Algeria are blowing up the electricity needed in Japan, will the EU send storm troopers to punish the locals?

While true, I’m not even going to try to play at global geopolitics; all I can say is that while deserts are a good place for PV, and while PV is the best thing I (being neither a biologist nor a geologist) know what to do with a dessert, the land area required for PV is low enough that even the UK — entirely north of the US-Canadian border — would be able to power itself in winter with no transmission and just a day/night storage system using 1% of its land area [0], so tiling the entire Sahara is unlikely: The same equations say that even if we electrify all world energy consumption, Algeria alone could supply everyone 6 times over, but you’d only do a global grid like this precisely if you didn’t want the huge storage system I’m implicitly adding to worsen the performance of my opinion and give your criticism the best possible chance.

[0] illumination = (cos(51 north + plus axial tilt) / π) * 1kW/m^2 ~= 87 W/m^2; efficiency = 20% ~> 17.5 W/m^2; 35 GW / (17.5 W/m^2) ~= 2000 km^2; U.K. land area ~= 242,495 km^2.

I think this is a bad idea, but economics beats aesthetics and someone would need to run the numbers that I don’t have to say which of storage and transmission is actually better. Perhaps the minima for the UK is PV in Algeria and HVDC, perhaps it is local x*PV + y*wind + z* batteries. It probably varies from any one country to the next.

"Which is going to be a fixed amount regardless of distance"

Sure, but knock off another 10%

"I would expect HVDC to be a dead end already if it made a difference to my conclusion."

I didn't get that. Could you re-phrase?

"Surely a web is the best topology? "

My point you're underestimating the line length since you cannot connect generation to consumption with a straight line. Also, the hub-spoke or a web network would need the connections to be much larger than needed for that city (since the city would also need to transmit to it's neighbors)

"While true, I’m not even going to try to play at global geopolitics; [..] worsen the performance of my opinion and give your criticism the best possible chance."

You cannot dismiss cultural concerns. Look what happened in Kabul last week!

> Sure, but knock off another 10%

> "I would expect HVDC to be a dead end already if it made a difference to my conclusion."

> I didn't get that. Could you re-phrase?

If the conversion losses were as high as 10%, why did anyone bother using HVDC for e.g. a mere 85 km stretch in the Trans Bay Cable?

But even if they were 10%, that’s a multiplier not an adder so it makes a difference of 10% to final energy prices, it wouldn’t break anything (though it might shift the minima to batteries, as those are also cheap and getting cheaper).

> My point you're underestimating the line length since you cannot connect generation to consumption with a straight line. Also, the hub-spoke or a web network would need the connections to be much larger than needed for that city (since the city would also need to transmit to it's neighbors)

I think you’re overestimating how much the losses matter. You only lose half your power from 20,000 km, adding an extra 10,000 km from wiggling around a bit takes you down to 34% of original generation, and even then webs usually have high-capacity connections between important locations and lower-capacity links from the high capacity nodes to the low use nodes. Is anywhere in the US more than about 2400 km from the coast? Because 2400 km is a multiplicative loss of 0.918 compared to whatever losses you get from a trans-oceanic link to wherever (0.77 from Algeria to DC, according to distance from Wolfram Alpha, likewise 0.66 from Queensland to San Francisco). And the USA already has (several) grids, so you’d probably just want to link any global HVDC connection like this into each grid, rather than to each city.

> You cannot dismiss cultural concerns. Look what happened in Kabul last week!

“I am not qualified to discuss them” absolutely is not the same thing as dismissing them.

But my main point is more of we don’t need to tile the Sahara (or any single particular place), so it shouldn’t even come up in the first place.

"If the conversion losses were as high as 10%, why did anyone bother using HVDC for e.g. a mere 85 km stretch in the Trans Bay Cable?"

1. Because AC also has transformation losses (2-3% per transformer. You need at least three (medium voltage, high voltage, medium voltage, low (house) voltage).

2. The answer is in the name, ain't it? It's underwater.

AC coupling in a dielectric increases losses very significantly. The longest underwater line AC line in the world is only 135 km, in Greece, for this very reason. The Greeks probably couldn't afford the capital to instal a DC line instead and settled for higher losses.

You pay for more expensive HVDC lines for three major purposes:

1. Underwater cables - see dielectric loss

2. Cheating on the synchronization

3. Long AC lines. This has many reasons:

- Take the speed of light, and divide it by 200Hz (50Hz * 4) = 300 000 km/s /200Hz = 1500 km. That's as long as an AC line can be before you start to deal with impedance reflections.

- Lowering losses. AC was famously adopted to lower ohmic losses by adopting high V. But, AC lines are coupled to ground (they're a massive capacitor to ground), so at a certain length you have to consider AC coupling losses that don't exist in DC

"But even if they were 10%, that’s a multiplier not an adder so it makes a difference of 10% to final energy prices, it wouldn’t break anything (though it might shift the minima to batteries, as those are also cheap and getting cheaper)."

I love how eagerly ppl dismiss 10% loss. I'm aware its a multiplicative - it's also an 11% increase in the amount of panels needed (1/0.9 = 1.1). You have to think of your losses in the inverse - how much added land you have to cover (and loose CO2 sinks to photosynthesis)

The things that are "cheap and getting cheaper" are things at a certain scale. Everyone loves things getting cheaper at scale, but forget that things also get more expensive at scale. Batteries don't get cheaper once you start running against the bounds of how much electrode material is available.

"I think you’re overestimating how much the losses matter. You only lose half your power from 20,000 km, adding an extra 10,000 km from wiggling around a bit takes you down to 34% of original generation"

so from you're original 50%, to 34%, a loss of 34/50, implying an increase in land covered of 50/34, or about 50% more land you have to cover.

50% more land if I accept your hand waving argument that you'll only need an extra 10Mm to get from point to point.

"“I am not qualified to discuss them” absolutely is not the same thing as dismissing them."

"I'm not qualified to discuss them" absolutely is used, de facto, as a license to ignore. It maybe the most common human rationalization.

"But my main point is more of we don’t need to tile the Sahara (or any single particular place), so it shouldn’t even come up in the first place."

You have to tile something. The Sahara makes most sense lacking vegetation. But sure, tile Ireland and see how much the local appreciate it.

Why do you keep bringing up AC-specific issues when I’m suggesting HVDC?

Also: since previous post Google says HVDC transformer/converter losses are about 1-3%, not 10%.

> The answer is in the name, ain't it? It's underwater.

Could’ve put traditional AC cables on towers on the sides of any of the large selection of road bridges. They didn’t. Why?

(Likewise: as the waters are demonstrably spanned by bridges, they can be spanned by cable towers)

> so from you're original 50%, to 34%, a loss of 34/50, implying an increase in land covered of 50/34, or about 50% more land you have to cover.

In the context that one country can supply 6 times global demand an extra 50% (a hand-waving factor I expect to be excessive given most of the world is ocean and therefore not going to get so much wiggle) makes no real difference. It’s not going to be the limiting factor.

> You have to tile something.

Same point. Land area isn’t the limiting factor.

> the UK would be able to power itself in winter with no transmission and just a day/night storage system using 1% of its land area

I see that you use 35GW - presumably the electricity use in the UK. However, with transport and heating, the total power use in the UK is about 190GW on average, and probably about twice that average in the middle of winter when everyone has their gas heaters on.

If you propose to replace fossil fuels, you need to account for electric heat pumps replacing gas heater, and electric cars replacing ICEs - which means an electricity consumption of 100-150GW, which means 4% of the UK area rather than 1%. (Assuming electricity storage is lossless which it isn't obviously.)

Fair quibble, though going from just under 1% to just over 3.5% of the UK makes very little difference to my core argument here, as this was an illustration of “we don’t need to tile Algeria with PV”. :)

Not a word about reducing consumption?

Americans consume more power than almost anyone and it's not improving our lives. Most of us can reduce our consumption 75% just on simple life improvements, at home and business. Nothing pollutes less than leaving the fuel in the ground. (Source: I'm not special and reduced mine about 90% and going. My latest electric bill was $4 and change (plus fixed line fees). In the spring I hit $1.40, as I wrote up in https://joshuaspodek.com/i-used-2-5-the-average-americans-el... and https://joshuaspodek.com/12-sustainability-leadership-lesson...).

It's a question of values and which ones we want to live by. Stewardship, family, community, resilience, enjoying what we have, humility toward nature, meaning, and purpose are always available but we have to choose them.

not just Americans, almost nobody can reduce consumption on such a large scale.

You can reduce electricity consumption easily by banning electric vehicles!

Or less flippantly: trying to reduce electricity use is very likely to result in increased fossil fuel use. And not just vehicles.

EVs are a tiny market in the US, smaller than e.g. the EV market in Germany (which has <20% of the US population) - I can't imagine this to be a big source of new grid load.

IMO a huge win-win situation would be enforcement of modern building techniques (proper insulation and/or thermal mass, double or triple glazed windows etc). That would enlarge qualitiy of living for the inhabitants, massively reduce energy consumption due to much less need for AC both in summer and winter. And buildings would probably last longer.

If enforced by law, this wouldn't even increase TCO of new buildings due to scale. That this isn't currently available in the US is essentially market failure: Small scale for modern construction means much higher prices than elsewhere, and better building quality currently is too esoteric to proportionally raise resale value.

Reducing the scope of civilization is hardly the answer. We want more electricity usage.

Poor people should have electric cars and air conditioning too. What about infrastructure and consumer goods that use electricity-intensive things like aluminium. We should be growing more, never less. The weak and vulnerable will be hit hardest by a decline.

What is all the power being used for ? Why the shortage ?

A substantial amount of the power generation in California comes from solar, whose output peaks at noon and drops off substantially in the evening. This leads to a situation in the 4-10 PM range where power usage is still at peak levels, but power generation has fallen off due to the drop in solar output. Natural gas peaker plants are used to fill that shortfall.

The California ISO publishes near real-time statistics on the grid where you can see this effect: https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html

Natural gas is a lot greener than everyone bhying little diesel generators for their houses i guess...

It's a lot greener than little generators you'd buy at Costco.

But don't dismiss neighborhood scale generation. It can approach efficiencies of large scale plants, while providing free heating/cooling. All whilst being very robust.

I think this illustrates one of the central issues in confronting climate change. Despite what politicians say about how much they prioritize climate change, when push comes to shove, they prioritize cheap, reliable power because that is what their constituents prioritize. So unless you can provide cheap, reliable power with zero carbon energy, we are not going to make much progress.

It’s sad to say, politicians don’t get elected on intellect.

I don't know if that describes California very well. They already accelerated solar and wind projects. I don't know if they could have prevented a shortfall in hydro power with a drought like this.

If CA actually cared about the environment they would mandate everyone drive a 20+ yr old cars.

The concept of strip-mining 100 tons of land to make a battery and then charging that battery with coal/nat gas is not environmentally friendly.

If you normalize to the metric "joules of power per $1 landed" its still very hard to beat petroleum. Sadly solar is still an order-of-magnitude away. However via some magical thinking Tesla drivers will claim "the economies of scale of charging millions of batteries by a coal powered plant makes it more efficient than gas." Thats simply press-release style thinking. A 25 y/o Toyota is 10x better for the environment.

i got downvoted on every discussion about electrics for similar comments on HN. the lobby is strong.

Yes, its for social media: When your environmental activism only needs to pass <280-char limit

Even if the grid were completely fossil fueled, an electric car would be more efficient thanks to the much higher efficiency of burning fossil fuels in large power generators vs tiny combustion engines.

"we lose money on each sale but plan to make it up on volume...."

That's not obvious to me.

Sure, using the numbers and technology we all learned about in thermo class 20 years ago (best ICE efficiency of a car is 20% usually gets much worse), I agree.

But the hybrid drivetrain throws all the assumptions of that common wisdom in the air. Namely:

- Throttle can be open all the way when power is needed, the engine turned off otherwise

- Engine can be made for efficiency, not power density

- Engine can be sized to average power, not worst case scenario over the lifetime of the car

On top of that, in the last 20 years, the power electronics revolution has made recovery of the energy in the exhaust stream possible (see F1).

I'd love to have an ICE expert tell me why ICE efficiency can't be double what common wisdom tells me what it is. I suspect it's environmental laws regulating NOx emissions (thus putting a hard upper bound on compression ratios). I really doubt an electric car can beat the carbon emissions of a natural gas powered ICE that achieves 40% efficiency. Not with our current energy mix anyway

ICE efficiency can absolutely be improved. The question is if it's worth it. EVs are already better, even assuming zero renewables on the grid (which obviously isn't the case), and get better each year as more renewables come online at an ever increasing pace.

We can either continue on the current path (which is certainly the path of least resistance), or we can pivot and make a massive investment in building out a CNG distribution system (not to mention all the R&D and production cost that would go into swapping out any significant percentage of the current vehicles on the road).

We need to convert the grid away from fossil fuels anyway. If we're doing that already, why take on the extra work of building out a consumer-facing CNG infrastructure?

I think CNG (and, for that matter, hydrogen) makes a ton of sense in certain circumstances. Mass transit fleets, truck depots, etc

Ok, but I want numbers. How good can ICEs get?

Mercedes claims their 1.5L F1 engine - designed for power, not efficiency - is over 50% thermally efficient. An EV can't match that. Not with the gas cycle efficiency and all the line power losses.

The practical limit for an ICE engine in a road car (in a hybrid configuration) is probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 50% (small sizes make efficiency harder). A theoretical ideal ICE hybrid would almost certainly beat a current day EV on the current day grid. But that's not a fair comparison, and we have to modernize the grid anyway.

F1 PUs are absolutely designed with efficiency in mind. The FIA limits both the maximum fuel used in a race, as well as the instantaneous fuel flow rate. When fuel flow rates are capped, getting more power is the same thing as getting more efficiency.

> 25 y/o Toyota is 10x better for the environment

And much worse on plenty of other metrics. The realistic trade-off is between a new ICE car and a new electric. Imagining a standstill in automotive production is about as unrealistic as shutting down California’s nuclear fleet was.

A fairer comparison is comparing the CO2 emissions caused by putting all that precious lithium and rare earths in one electric car vs. putting it in several light trucks.

The workman's hybrid Ford Maverick or hybrid Ford 150 replacing a pure gas powered Tesla is far better for the environment. There's a reason why hybrid technology debuted in massive machines - they're the ones who benefit the most

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