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Comment by threeseed | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't work in every country but renewables with storage can provide 24/7 power.

And it's a fraction of the price of nuclear.

Renewables with “magic” storage. Wind can be low for a month for a whole country (cf UK last year). There is no storage technology that can store that much power at scale. What you need is an alternative on demand source of energy, which cost is always omitted when looking at renewable energy cost.

Actually, no.

The only climate compatible way is not an alternative on demande source of energy, but the other way around: adapt our energy consumption to its availability and significantly lower our energy use. (see this 2009 piece by low tech magazine[1])

This is the real issue with dealing with climate change: we have to drastically change our way of living, in ways that most of us have not properly grasped and are not ok with.

But it is not a matter of choice, this will happen. It is a matter of choosing to do it in a somewhat controlled manner over the few time left, of to be subjected to this change in a brutal way.

[1]: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/11/renewable-energy-i...

Not possible to build a civilization with hunter gatherer ways of harvesting power. "The sun didn't shine and wind speed was too low, so the ventilators stopped and people died".

We need energy equivalent of grains: renewable and storable.

Outside of pumped hydro, storage is very expensive. Would need something like a 15x reduction in storage costs to be competitive with nuclear.

And pumped hydro isn't a panacea either.

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/11/pump-up-the-storage/

That's nonsense.

https://model.energy/

Would the people who built this cross a river which used to have an average depth of 5 feet in 2011 with a medival knight suit on?

If yes, they should do that. If no, they should take the website down and stop misleading people.

The argument you are trying to make there completely fails to defend the claim that storage need to be 15x cheaper for renewables to compete with nuclear.

And where do you build that hydro? I hear some people suggesting Europe using the valleys in Sweden and Norway. Imagine the EU electricity grid at the mercy of one of Putin’s submarines. The rest of Europe doesn’t have many valleys left to flood.

All you really need for pumped hydro is a hill. It's cheaper if there is a natural basin up there, but you can build sides of you need to.

Luckily Putin would never capture a nuclear plant.

He needs to pass through NATO forces and successfully prove the nuclear deterence wrong before you need to start worrying about that.

Didn't he already capture Zaporizhzhia?

That isn't on NATO territory. (Alack and alas.)

But yeah, neither are the Swedish river valleys (so far).

24/7 isn't true at all. People keep repeating this like it's 2020. There's an ongoing energy crisis that started in 2021. Low wind speeds across all of Europe were a massive trigger.

also France stopped 13+ nuclear reactors mid-winter which really did not help.

But defects were found that would jeopardize the current evaluation to renew the certification for using them for 10 more years, so the decision was made to stop several reactors for forced maintenance and repairs.

Do you have a source regarding your pricing claim?

Renewables are usually cheaper per W, but way more expensive in real world usage (battery storage + full life cycle costs)

See for yourself: https://model.energy/

The area around Finland and Eastern Europe is one of the worst in the world for renewables, though.

Awesome simulation tool, but why is nuclear power absent from the simulation?

It's not! The strangely named "Dispatchable 2" can be turned on as an option; it's based on the economics of the EPR (although you can change all the assumptions as needed.) If you do that, you'll find the solutions tend to be either "no nuclear" or "all nuclear", depending on the cost assumptions. This is a counter to the people who suggest "renewables, but use nuclear to cover the last 20%", which is a dumb idea.

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