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Comment by flor1s | Hacker News Reader

Is day and night really the problem here? Because I thought demand usually peaks at certain times of the day (e.g. early in the evening in California: https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/rate-plans/rate-plan-o...), and actually bottoms out during the night. You would mostly use an interconnected grid (and storage) to compensate for this.

Also there is wind energy which doesn't care about whether the sun shines or not (actually it generates more energy when the sun isn't shining: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/wind-power-turbin...).

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In most of the Europe the biggest use of energy for family will be heating except summer. In the future probably also charging electric car. This kind of power demand you need mostly at night when sleeping - during the day you are probsbly in the office.

Transmitting power also consumes energy - you cannot have a electric wire across pacific to transmit power from US to EU without transformers - electric power line is not a fiber optic that transmit just signal.

I also doubt we have enough rare earth minerals to make all those magnets for wind turbine and and electric car enough for whole planet. Remember also you have to decomission those windturbine after some years which is expensive

At least in The Netherlands we mostly use centralised (gas-powered) heating, so nuclear energy is a tangential factor. Also there seems to be room for improvement in insulation and centralised thermal storage (warmtenet in Dutch). Electric cars seem both like both a problem and an opportunity, because you could charge them while being at the office and partly use their batteries for powering your home at night (in case you don't need a full charge to get to work in the morning).

Regarding rare earths, we will need them regardless of using nuclear or renewables for electric cars, so that seems partly tangential. For wind turbines their reliance on rare earths seems troublesome. It's geopolitically ironic that we (Western Europeans) get our gas from Russia and our rare earths from China.

Electric cars are currently mostly charged at night (since that's when electricity is cheaper), but as solar becomes more prevalent, that will swap. Charging cars during the day is pretty easy, just require office parking lots to have chargers (and possibly subsidize).

You are right that you can't have an electric wire across the Pacific to get power from the US to the EU, but more because the EU doesn't border the Pacific. On a more serious note, Novia Scotia to Ireland is about 2600 miles, so it's on the edge of doable with HVDC, but it would be a massive project and slightly hard to justify.

I'm interested to know what rare earth metals make up so much of a wind turbine. According to https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy17osti/66861.pdf (page 65), around 99% of a turbine is accounted for by steel, fiberglass, iron, copper, and aluminum.

The one project that is likely to actually come into fruition is the HVDC cable betweebn Iceland and UK for wind power:

https://www.offshorewind.biz/2021/05/24/usd-30-billion-north...

Whats funny about this is, that the wind farm will not even be connected to Iceland itself! I guess they have such great geothermal resources that they don't really need more power.

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