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Comment by pilsetnieks | Hacker News Reader

> in particular solar doesn't work in emergency situations such as volcano eruptions rendering the sky dark.

I'm not familiar with this. Is this a common problem in Germany? Are southern states like Baden-Württemberg more afflicted or less compared to more northern ones like Schleswig-Holstein?

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No, it is a hypothesis of mine, that a large volcano eruption may disrupt the function of solar within a large area that was affected and which depends on solar energy. A particular example may be

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1815_eruption_of_Mount_Tambora

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

A single "year without summer" may be the fatal blow to a society basing their energy on solar energy, so I hypothesize.

I don't think nuclear is much more resistant against forces of nature than solar/wind are... An INES level 7 accident in France could cause a similar outage in France's nuclear capacity (similar to Japan's nuclear lost decade). Or massive droughts could cause nationwide nuclear outages due to a lack of cooling water. Having a mix of nuclear/solar/wind with hydrogen as a "battery" in an EU super grid seems like a good way to mitigate the risks.

No, but winter is. Inclination of the earth means solar produces considerably less energy in winter and this is even more prevalent in far northern/southern latitudes. Also cloud coverage can drastically reduce solar output.

We really need to locate the panels near the equator, and combine it with one day of storage. There is a project like this:

https://electrek.co/2021/09/27/the-worlds-longest-subsea-cab...

The problem for doing this large scale if the right of way for the HVDC lines. I'm watching this on a smaller scale in Massachusetts, where Maine voters are blocking a HVDC link to Hydro Quebec. But I think this is a game between established interests.. in this case NextEra funded the ballot question and advertising, I think because they lost out on their SeaLink project (HVDC to Seabrook nuclear power plant).

https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2020/09/f79/EXHIBIT%...

https://www.newscentermaine.com/article/news/politics/refere...

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