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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

> As billions more people become part of a global middle class our energy requirements will expand dramatically from today.

https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy04osti/35097.pdf

"In the United States, cities and residences cover about 140 million acres of land. We could supply every kilowatt-hour of our nation’s current electricity requirements simply by applying PV to 7% of this area—on roofs, on parking lots, along highway walls, on the sides of buildings, and in other dual-use scenarios."

"We would need only 10 million acres of land—or only 0.4% of the area of the United States—to supply all of our nation’s electricity using PV."

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Isn't the intermittency of the energy source the issue? And there's currently no scalable solution to efficiently store excess energy generated from solar panels?

It's rather amazing that you think that people haven't already thought of this issue and addressed it.

In fact, it's long been addressed, and the cost of dealing with intermittency of renewable sources appears acceptable.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910

> Even former critics must admit that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels. These critics are still questioning whether 100% RE is the cheapest solution but no longer claim it would be unfeasible or prohibitively expensive.

Sure, that's why no one proposes only solar, nor do they propose solar in only one place at a time.

Intermittency means you need storage too. So, you build out storage too. The observation is vacuous.

A renewable grid includes storage. Storage is cheap and getting cheaper.

I really wish this sort of thing would either be better thought through or better articulated. 10 million acres is enormous. And is it continuous supply (if so, how?) Or just supply when it's sunny?

Isn't it amazing that no one has ever thought about these things before you dropped in?

You've missed my point.

Everybody has known all along that renewables generation is intermittent. Mentioning it adds no light.

And renewables happily coexist with other uses of the same land, so none is used up.

> Everybody has known all along that renewables generation is intermittent

That doesn't mean it's made clear in statistics. I've read plenty of people say "X generates as much as Y", where X is intermittent and Y is suitable for base load. Certainly enough to disagree that everyone knows it and is able to discern that from context-free statistics.

Literally every single person on Earth who even knows what renewables are knows they are intermittent. No one imagines solar panels produce peak power all the time, or any power at night.

You've missed my point again. Every time someone says "renewables supply 80% of power required" or similar, without stating the context of what that means, it creates false impressions in people's minds. Is it 80% on the sunniest day ever? 80% of actual load but using storage? 80% of the load 5% of the time?

I'm not saying if people think it through they won't understand it, I'm saying that context-free stats like that create false impressions in some people's minds based on whatever the assume about the stat, and annoy people like me who'd like to know where the stat came from.

0.4% of the entire country is a massive amount of land.

That’s 10 million acres of wires, maintenance, habitat and all kinds of mischievous creatures, not least of which are humans. And it only works when the weather is good. And not all countries have the grid or engineering and maintenance capacity of the United States.

It’s not a realistic solution.

By all means, lets put solar panels everywhere we already have buildings and roofs and power hookups and make a dent. Maybe at some point it’ll be possible to use solar alone, and we can keep up the maintenance.

Going all in on solar right now would be suicide. It’d be worse than the effects of anthropogenic warming. People are going to freeze to death this winter in Germany because they bought into the promise of renewables before it delivered and didn’t diversify their energy supply.

You should only phase something out when you can meet demands without it. Nuclear is a way to do that. Natural gas is a way to do that. Renewables are a way to do that. But you have to actually exceed demand and have a solid diversified base before you panic switch because of climate change. Otherwise you kill and impoverish more people than climate change.

The argument from incredulity has rather a poor history. Are you sure you want to join in with all its previous failures?

I'm waiting for him to realize that agriculture will use two orders of magnitude more land than is needed to power the US with renewables. Will he conclude that eating is impossible?

One of the things I like about this site is the restraint (at least in comparison to other places) in substituting an argument this kind of snarky scoffing and engagement. It’s brainless.

Agriculture is already working, or was until its been starting to be shut down and curtailed due to alleged environmental issues like in the Netherlands. You can manage much larger chunks of land with plows and combines and other vehicles because of how you interact with the land when farming.

You can’t plant solar panels and have them just grow out of the ground and repair themselves and reproduce largely independently. It’s a totally different type of land use. Managing solar farms is magnitudes more effort to build and maintain than agriculture.

Yes, solar and wind take money to build and operate.

They require less money to build, and less to operate, than nuclear (per unit of energy output).

So, your talking about land could only be a valid objection if land itself was the constraint. And that's what my snark about eating was aimed at.

Costs on paper, cost in reality over time, and cost due to physical and manpower constraints vs cost due to government subsidies and regulation are not equivalent.

This claim that 10 million acres of solar panels is cheaper to build and maintain and actually put into use and store power from vs extremely high energy output nuclear plants with tiny footprints that can produce continuously reeks of extremely biased accounting.

We can look at actual costs in the real world to confirm what I just told you. This is not some conspiracy to defame your energy waifu.

The arrogance and presumption is the issue. I don’t think it’s a conspiracy at all. Frankly I don’t trust people who aggressively point to models and facts and figures and don’t actually engage with the WHY and the caveats and actually think about the risk of non correspondence between the figures and the real world.

That does not mean you’re wrong, I simply don’t trust your hand wavy dismissive argument about it being cheaper.

If I see a report that looks at the long term maintenance cost of an actually deployed modern solar farm, not hypothetical ones, and compares it to an actually deployed modern nuclear reactor, I’ll take that one.

I have an affinity for whatever actually works, the main reason I think nuclear looks good is I trust basic physics and understand how much astronomically higher the energy density of nuclear power is in comparison to like everything else.

The economics of renewables are the simplest and most transparent ever seen in power generation.

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