Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

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This is such a tediously nonsensical interjection:

...laying the groundwork for a promising new source of renewable energy that isn't dependent on sunny days or strong winds.

How many times does it need to be said that any reliable energy system run entirely on sunlight and wind absolutely has to incorporate storage? Storage can be electrical (short-term supercapacitors for buffering high-frequency variations in windfarms), electrochemical (batteries, and since portability is not an issue, there are many options for grid-storage batteries besides lithium), chemical (using electrical current to drive the formation of hydrocarbons from CO2 and water, aka artificial photosynthesis, and similar conversions), or mechanical (pumped water storage, rotating heavy masses, air pressure in caverns, etc.). That about covers the range of storage options I think.

I don't know what to think about people that trot that one out over and over again but to be charitable I'll just assume gross ignorance at this point, rather than deliberate deception.

Because incorporating storage into the story also means brining in the cost. Many of the solutions are not cheap, dependent on specific geology, and / or have their own large carbon footprint.

The only thing that solar and wind bring to the table is being very cheap, but you need to compare apples to oranges for them to stand up to other solutions.

Edit: this is regional specific, but wind and solar are worthless for one to two months a year where I live - rarely much sun or wind. There's simply not enough storage to power much of anything for that long, so even with cheap storage, it's worth having options that don't rely on weather.

Of course, we are nowhere even close to an ocean, so this tech isn't it, but keeping exploring options is nice.

solar and air-conditioning. Energy consumption correlates with production. A match made in heaven.

You're demonstrating my point. Solar and wind are useful for cheap green peak power if the peak coincides with weather- a best case scenario that varies by region.

Grid power supply needs to be robust enough for worst case (or even just normal bad) scenarios, or else people die.

You are clearly in wrong here. There's a reliable energy system run entirely on sunlight, that is basically identical to the proposed deep ocean currents in the principle: hydropower. In short: the storage is built-in - it is in the potential energy of that small percentage of the water in the oceans, which is still large enough to be absolutely immense.

Storage is kind of the major blocker for those technologies currently.

Most countries (if not all?) are still far from the point where storage "blocks" solar/wind. But moving forward, more storage will be needed. And I am quite optimistic that it will be there as soon there is enough energy to store in the first place. Some of it will come anyway, as electric cars make for great storage. Switching cars to electric doesn't only directly reduce CO2 emissions, they are a great way of storing surplus electricity and also drive the cost for battery storage down.

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