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Comment by winkeltripel | Hacker News Reader

There are a couple of things to consider. The solar and wind need to be overprovisioned, to feed the grid scale batteries to provide baseload. Those batteries are currently not cost effective, which is why there are very few such batteries in use. If you add in the price of battery, wind and solar look rather pricey. Without the batteries, they are helping us reduce the use of fossil fuel plants, but not helping shut them down.

The other thing is the land. Solar and wind each need a substantial % of landmass to have 100% of our power come from those sources.

The ongoing costs of running nuclear are also way higher than solar or wind, which matters.

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No one uses batteries for large scale (eg overnight) storage. They are used for grid stability (eg, 1/2 hour supply).

Reliability comes from solar and wind power redundancy and geographic distribution. If your collection area is over a few thousand square kilometres it is very rare for there to be no wind and no sun. Make it a few tens of thousand square kms (which modern high voltage transmission achieves) and your reliability is higher than coal.

Except when the North Sea wind was weaker than usual in 2021, triggering an energy crisis that has persisted to this day. This impacted almost the entirety of Europe and led to a spike in gas prices, since, surprise, all the backup plants rely on gas and coal.

Evidently you failed to read "redundancy and geographic distribution".

That there is North Sea wind power, howsoever intermittent, is a pure good. Tying it into a larger network makes it better. The solution to local deficits is more localities.

There is not infinite transmission capacity in all directions. It is difficult to get permission to build new transmission lines, which are also expensive.

Build. More. Transmission. Lines.

Transmission lines are not expensive at all compared to nuclear power. This nuclear plant cost $12B and it is a cheap one!

Compare that to the SunCable is budgetted at $14B, (AU $20B in the article = US$20B) which is an undersea(!) HVAC cable all the way from Australia to Singapore (3,800km!) AND a 3GW(!) solar farm[1].

By comparison, the distance from Spain to Scotland is 2400km. And when the wind stopped in the North Sea, Spain was setting records in terms of the amount of power generated from wind farms[2]

[1] https://www.intelligentliving.co/australian-undersea-sun-cab...

[2] https://www.evwind.es/2021/12/03/27-8-of-electricity-came-fr...

Look at Latvia. >45% hydro, plenty of space for wind, both on shore and off shore, and hardly any of that potential realised with only 2.2% active wind energy production.

Significant public investment in wind energy announced to start construction in... 2026. That is a glacial pace in the face of an ecological and geopolitical crisis situation.

4 years planning, That is normal before for starting construction. There are environmental studies to be done first to ensure any damage to the environment the work would cause can be mitigated. There are permits to be issued which must include the mitigation measures. Some design work must be done to get the permits so they know what they are permitting. Land must be purchased, transmission right of ways granted. Enough design work must be done to place the order for long lead time equipment, such as wind turbines. How many, how big, where do they go for best ROI? Some of these permitting steps face opposition and negotiations must take place. This is the process real world infrastructure projects face.

Latvia is still climbing out from under Soviet domination. Rich countries should lead.

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