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Comment by greenthrow | Hacker News Reader

It makes a lot more sense to transport the energy to the water than vice versa.

I don't agree with their plan to make synthetic hydrocarbons, but they are right about solar. In 50 years solar will be so ubiquitous and cheap that people will be horrified that we kept burning fossil fuels and building nuclear plants for so long.

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But this way is carbon neutral. Every CO2 molecule you pump out, started out as a CO2 molecule you took from the air. There is no reason to dislike fossil fuels, if they no longer come from fossils. It's the releasing of carbon from millions of years ago that's creating the excess.

Except for carbon monoxide, soot, etc., that contribute to a variety of health problems.

Gas is (relatively speaking) quite clean, and presumably pure synthetic gas likely to be even cleaner.

But Neutral < Negative.

Capturing CO2 is not ‘energy cheap’ and therefore it is best when and where possible much of what we start capturing to rid it from the carbon cycle rather than re-introduce it.

Solar is already extremely cheap, when costed out over it's minimal lifetime. At grid scale, it has dipped down to crazy levels.

As you said, this trend will keep on going.

According to a couple of studies discussed in [1], solar is cheap, but storage is still expensive.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...

For grid scale, batteries add a lot of value. They can pay for themselves rather quickly since they react far quicker than spinning up FF peakers.

Real world example, one of the biggest batteries in the world likely will be paid off in 2-3 years: https://electrek.co/2018/09/24/tesla-powerpack-battery-austr...

I suspect those weren't included in the studies because they aren't grid scale yet.

Consider that "one of the biggest batteries in the world" stores 129 MWh, enough to sustain the US grid for one second.[1] (Of course, it can't discharge that quickly, so we really need four thousand of them to sustain the grid for one hour).

For comparison, the current capacity of pumped-storage hydroelectricity in the US is about 550GWh[2], the equivalent of about four thousand of those facilities. And we still don't have enough storage to replace nonrenewables with solar.

Batteries like that one won't reduce the actual price of energy storage here until Tesla builds thousands of installations in the US alone. And it would take hundreds of thousands worldwide (along with solar generation) to replace nonrenewable generation.

But it is a promising technology. If many are built quickly, and the reported financials prove accurate and scalable, we might have cheap grid-scale storage in ten or twenty years.

1: According to the US Energy Information administration, the US grid generates about 4 billion MWh per year.

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...

That's about 127 MWh per second.

2: "[In the United States] forty-three PSH plants with a total power capacity of 21.9 GW and estimated energy storage capacity of 553 GWh accounted for 93% of utility-scale storage power capacity (GW) and more than 99% of electrical energy storage (GWh) in 2019."

https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2021/01/f82/us-hydro...

You can easily run a grid on 60% renewables with essentially no storage at all. We have a long way to go before 60% of the world's primary power consumption is switched to renewables.

But if you drive most non-renewables out of business in the process, you'll have a lot of outages at night.

Germany runs on about 50% renewable electricity and doesn't have outages at night.

I see we're not discussing the same thing. I was talking about the cost of solar and storage, Germany uses more wind and a lot of biomass and hydro.

But I'm happy to discuss this too. That 50% figure is a peak (achieved when conditions were favorable) and ignores imported electricity.

According to [1], renewables accounted for 41% of power production in Germany in 2021, but only 16.1% of primary energy consumption.

AIUI, that difference comes from (a) imports and (b) the fact that primary energy consumption also includes heating and transport, two sectors that often aren't directly powered by electricity yet, but which must be before an economy can stop consuming non-renewable energy.

1: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...

Making hydrocarbons for airplanes and maybe for cargo ships makes sense unless the power density of batteries increases dramatically. Creating hydrocarbons to put into commuter cars and trucks that traverse developed regions sounds like a bad idea.

I am sort of in a middle ground on this. Hydrocarbons are near magic in terms of their physical properties and electric, as it stands currently, have major problems replacing them in some situations (aviation/shipping).

I don't think we will entirely replace them, not unless there is some big innovation. Which could happen. I think it is going to be a combination of, mass uptake in renewables that come to about 1/2 or 1/4th of the total energy we use today, gains in efficiency from using electric rather than combustible heat engines, hydrocarbons in those few places it still makes sense - and most importantly - rational use of energy! Planned public transport instead of private vehicles for instance. Some stuff more in line with the sustainability and permaculture stuff that was being developed in the 1970's.

Why do you not believe in synthetic hydrocarbons? What else do you believe is a better alternative then?

Your questions are loaded. You're doing the religious person thing of "Well you don't believe in Jesus, so what do you believe in?" Just because I don't believe synthetic hydrocarbons are a good idea doesn't mean I have to have a replacement.

The point is “if there is nothing better or less bad, then we have to go for it”. Shouldn’t stop us from looking for something better though.

Synthetic hydrocarbons may be the stepping stone civilisation needs, until a better way of storing renewable energy at grid scale is invented. If you don't like them for unspecified reasons, and don't propose a viable alternative, you're not contributing to the debate.

> It makes a lot more sense to transport the energy to the water than vice versa.

That’s my gut feeling as well. Perhaps the location of the consumer of the hydrocarbons would change that in some cases.

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