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Comment by yodelshady | Hacker News Reader

> 5GW of solar [in Finland]

Okay I'm afraid that's it for me. Being on a discussion board that has to debate "is deploying solar in Finland a good idea?" is not worth it.

Incidentally, yes, it took Finland 10 years to build their last reactor. They commissioned it a week or so ago, mere days before Russia disconnected them. Literally nothing we can effectively do to mitigate climate change takes <5 any more, including a fair few GW-scale wind farms I know of. Refusal to face that is why we are facing the calamity we are. Cheers.

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You understand that parts of Finland get 24-hour sunlight all summer long?

Producing electricity during the summer nights is basically useless. There's a huge diurnal effect, and an even larger seasonal one. The consumption at the winter peak is roughly double that of the summer trough.

Solar is fundamentally a bad fit for Finland. (Wind is a little bit tricky too, since abnormally low winter temperatures correlate with low wind speeds. But that is a problem on the time scale of a week, rather than half the year.)

So, during summer, you don't need to pay to have ammonia shipped in. During winter, on occasions when wind threatens to die down for longer than your stock of ammonia will last you, you order a shipment.

I have no idea of what you mean by "a shipment of ammonia". 24 hour sunlight does not work to make solar power viable in Finland, because that extra production happens exactly when there is least need for electricity, and there is no economical way to store that energy for consumption 7 months later.

Basically nobody builds solar power in Finland. It's about 0.3% of the electricity production (while renewables as a whole are more than 50%). That's the reality. Your idea that the summer nights would somehow make it economical is an uninformed fairy tale.

Where does Finland get fuel for its turbines today? Fuel is imported.

Do you really imagine that importation will become impossible just because additional means of power generation, such as wind, have been added?

In near future decades, synthetic ammonia will become cheaper, per kWh, than NG, and reliably available from, e.g., solar farms in the tropics. So, that will be imported, instead of more expensive alternatives, during times when local renewables, local storage, and transmission lines do not supply enough of cheaper power.

At other times, not.

Cost of solar generation equipment is still in exponential free fall. If it is not yet a good buy for the times it could produce, it will be after the cost falls enough. That is how economics works. Planning based on current cost when cost is in sharp decline is bad planning.

The ability to import fuels, even if synthetically generated ones, for most of the year doesn't seem like much of a benefit.

Currently 14% of the Finnish electricity generation is done using fossil fuels + peat. That should go down as Olkiluoto 3 starts production. The infra you're assuming is not there. So your plan would in practice require building up not only massive amounts of solar power but also similarly massive amounts of new fuel-powered power plants that you'd run with foreign fuel for half the year. That is a really shit plan.

Look, it is obvious you're fanatical about solar power. And I'm sure it is a great fit for the areas where most of humans currently live. But it is an awful fit for a country at the Arctic circle. By making up these fairy tales about how it'd work, you just lose your credibility when talking about the areas of the world you actually know something about.

Importing synthetic fuel, at need, at a radically cheaper price than what operating a nuke year-round costs would be rather a large benefit.

Refusal to admit that most of the world does not live in Finland seems to be a bit disconnected from reality.

It's good news, but as I said:

> But it's pretty tiny climate news overall.

Japan may also have a pretty good argument for pushing nuclear, as well as a few other places, but they are mostly just doomed to have higher energy prices than other parts of the word because of it. Not high enough perhaps to seriously disadvantage them on the global economy, but higher than places that have better natural energy sources.

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