Comment by yodelshady | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yodelshady | Hacker News Reader

Honest question for renewables advocates:

Where would you rank US-west in terms of "industrialised places where its easiest to phase out fossils or nuclear for renewables"?

Because for my money, it may be the best-suited place in the world.

- Lowish latitude, so winter nights are never that long, and usage peaks are in summer; - Fair amount of land - even in CA, especially if we cheat a bit and assume NV is playing ball; - Lots of money.

And even there, nuclear or gas are still necessary. Maybe Australia beats it.

I can say this, Europe - including the UK - has over the last two decades made the worst energy decisions, probably ever. Winter peaking with 16 hour nights, and last year we had week-long periods with generation of, to all intents and purposes, zero useful power from wind during that period. For what its worth, this year Germany restarted 8 GW of coal, and I'm sorry but no other country in the world should be listening to European lectures on climate ever again after that. Wholesale costs have exceeded $500 per MWh, they briefly peaked in London at $9000, and the same amount of battery storage costs $100,000. I have talked to investors on the latter figure and none expect that figure to decrease significantly. Raw materials will not humour your optimism.

Pardon me, what the actual fuck are we supposed to do?

The more relevant question is, how easy would it be to power the whole country with nuclear.

The US has a long history of research, still has a huge amount of knowlage of nuclear inside the country. And the US has the scale that if they select 1-2 plant designs, the same plant can be built, over and over and over again. A luxury small countries don't have.

If the US simple decided to invest money in transition away from coal and gas, you simple plan a nuclear plant next to every existing coal plant and use your currently existing grid.

In terms of transitioning to renewables, the US is highly variable, and each regions need to do very complex analysis on what exactly it needs. How much wind and solar it has, what the current grid is and how to adjust it. And then also how much storage you need to keep reliability.

If you are going to transport energy over long distances (something traditional grid designs tried to avoid) you need to then interlink all these complex island of renewable+storage. You make your region depended on wind energy from another state.

> Pardon me, what the actual fuck are we supposed to do?

Look at how NASA did the COST and CommercialCrew program. Pick 2-6 nuclear plant designs, grantee that each on of the winners gets to build at least 4 plants and and then build a sales pipeline in cooperation with all utilizes to plan form more.

Then just build as many as you can, as fast as you can. Likely within a decade you will be finishing many reactors every year and you easily build enough electricity to power the grid, plus transportation, heating and even aviation.

If France could mostly do this in 1970s with sub-optimal technology from the 1960s, why would it be harder now.

I didn't follow the case of Europe, but I did follow a bit the US.

Take a look at the first graph in [1]. Roughly speaking at this point the US gets 20% electricity from each of coal, renewable and nuclear and 40% from natural gas. In 1990 gas and renewables were standing both at around 10% (renewables in those times were just hydro). Gas went up exponentially to get to 4 times as high now. Renewables double, but that is deceiving. Hydro stayed constant, and wind and solar went from 0 to 10%. Nuclear was roughly constant for the last 20 years.

How do we get from here to net zero? It's quite simple actually: keep replacing coal with natural gas and renewables. In about 5 years coal should get to essentially zero. Then start keep growing renewables, and start replacing natural gas. Keep nuclear constant if possible. 2050 for net zero is easily achievable.

But that's maybe because, as you said, the US is in a nearly ideal position.

In EU, start by replacing all coal by nat gas. That's the best bang for the buck in terms of reducing emissions. Keep growing solar and wind. When the sun doesn't shine, and the wind doesn't blow, run the nat gas stations. In one decade or at most 15 years, we'll start shipping liquefied hydrogen. Most likely we'll convert the current LNG carriers to LH2 carriers. We should be able to convert nat gas power plants to hydrogen power plants. The EU is investing more than $100 BN into the hydrogen economy. It will work. 2050 will be doable. Not as doable as in the US, but still doable.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=48896

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