Comment by idiotsecant | Hacker News Reader

Comment by idiotsecant | Hacker News Reader

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This is absolutely not true. My day job is designing control systems for renewable generation so I certainly don't have a bias against renewables - the opposite in fact.

The fact remains that the physics of a grid powered only by distributed non-dispatchable wind and solar resources simply does.not.work. full stop without massive investments in storage and transmission upgrades. The physics isn't even debatable - it's simple. You only have to look at the very limited transmission infrastructure that currently exists and understand the simple fact that the power grid is a zero sum game. Power in = Power out or very bad things happen that lead to power out = 0. Zero sum generation + aging transmission = not enough power where you need it, when you need it if you get rid of traditional baseload sources.

It's good to champion renewable generation, storage, and transmission upgrades. It's necessary infrastructure for the economic and actual health of our nation. It is not going to be inexpensive by any definition of the term. It's going to be monumentally expensive even if it's completely necessary.

I honestly think this is one area which should be nationalised rather than left to the private sector. Yes, the investment will be massive, on the trillions scale. But:

a) Once it's done, you're pretty much self sufficient energy wise. Sure, you may need the raw materials from other countries to make panels, turbines and batteries. But once you've achieved a 100% renewable clean energy grid, you're getting a fairly decent lifespan out of everything so you're not going to be as subjected to the whims of the market like most of Europe is experiencing with gas. The market should generally be more stable.

b) Once your citizens have free energy, they have a massive chunk of disposable cash they were once spending energy. They will spend that or invest it: and both general spending and investing are taxed at higher rates than fuel spending (5% VAT on fuel spending in UK compared to 20% general VAT rate). Yes that is a massive loan for the government to put on the books, but they will probably get it back much quicker than expected.

> Once it's done, you're pretty much self sufficient energy wise.

What arm of the USA government do you trust most to get this job done efficiently and fairly? What do you think will happen when you use "more than your share" of electricity for a month or two and your (undoubtedly centrally controlled) account is deemed unacceptable? Or is it your thought that providing electricity free will reduce consumption?

I’m in the UK so I don’t know which branch of the US government I’d trust to get it done. What I do know, is that you guys have done some incredible things, look at your railways, roads, cities, subways, internet, space program. You have done massive scale programs in the past and I have no doubt that you could do it again in the future if the political will was there.

As for the second part, privately owned houses would get as much energy as the solar panels and battery on their property can provide. Additional power would come from the grid and would have to be paid for as normal. For people in apartments, presumably you have records of normal energy usage for every house and apartment, you could use those to work out the amount of solar panels needed to add to a solar farm or the equivalent for wind. The government pays for the installation of that and the citizen gets the energy generated for free. Additional energy they use is then paid for out of their own pocket.

The surest way to make someone not value something is to give it to them for free. Giving away energy is a good way to make sure that we use as much energy as we produce, and then some. The key, I think, is to make energy usage painful, but make that pain proportional to your resources. A big power bill to a billionare and a big power bill to a single mom on food stamps should result in the same level of emotional distress to both - hopefully very little.

Normally I would agree with you but not on this. There is a giant nuclear reactor in the sky giving out as much energy as we could ever possibly want. Literally all energy on this planet came from it: sunlight feeds the plants which are turned to oil or feed the animals which feed us.

Once we have built the machinery to harness that energy, it does become pretty much free and we can use as much or as little of it as we like. The cost of maintaining the machinery will become ever cheaper due to the amount of power we can get for little to no effort. It becomes self sustaining.

There are literally ongoing efforts right now to replicate Asimov’s vision which was to create space based solar farms and transmitting the energy back down in radio waves to specific points. We could literally harness our entire planets energy use from just a few of these in strategic locations if it was done right:

https://www.getsunsights.com/will-the-concept-of-space-solar...

Yes, there is a great deal of energy at the core of the milky way galaxy as well. Unfortunately my ability to use it to make toast in the morning is quite limited.

It turns out your ability to harness energy is kind of important. We're nowhere near that level of energy capture. We can't even handle transmitting solar from one corner of one smallish continent to the other, we're nowhere near the level of technology and infrastructure development you're talking about.

If you give people a limited amount of free power that's equivalent to giving them some free money. Which is fine and dandy but it's rather unrelated to how the grid works.

If you give people an unlimited amount of free power they're going to use it to mine cryptocurrency in a massively wasteful and expensive way.

I didn’t mean unlimited free power. I’d basically propose that the government would pay for as many solar panels as you can fit on your roof plus a battery in the garage or in a utility room. For apartments, the government would pay for some solar panels installed on a solar farm and you’d get a certain amount of energy for free covering the typical energy use of the size of your apartment. So we’re mainly just covering normal domestic usage. Of course if you’ve got anything spare you’re free to use that mining crypto but I don’t think that’s what the majority of households are really going to be doing.

> without massive investments in storage and transmission upgrades

So, we build storage and transmission. Storage cost is falling even faster than generation, and there are zero physics problems to be solved, just practical civil engineering.

The cost of this much civil engineering will be very large, but much smaller than e.g. for that much nukes, and we will pay it, because the only other choice is global collapse when the degraded biosphere becomes unable to sustain our population.

  > Storage cost is falling even faster than generation,

Citation please. The high demand for EVs and other battery-hungry devices has led to a situation where grid scale energy storage costs are currently increasing year over year and expected to continue doing so [1]. And pumped hydro storage is not something that will flexible enough for general deployment.

  > and there are zero physics problems to be solved,
  > just practical civil engineering.

Alchemy is not a solved problem, and there is only so much lithium to go around.

[1] https://cleanenergynews.ihsmarkit.com/research-analysis/grid...

Batteries are the most expensive storage. The overwhelming majority of storage will not be batteries. Of what is batteries, the overwhelming majority will not be lithium. Lithium batteries are well adapted for cars and phones. Other qualities are favored for utility storage.

> Alchemy is not a solved problem

Ah, trolling. OK.

Making a substantive point using humor != trolling.

What form of grid/utility energy storage do you expect will dominate in 20 years?

I provided a reference to back up my assertion. Do you have any?

a mix of hydro and non-lithium batteries. for grid scale batteries, you don't care about weight, and if you make it big enough can hear the battery if it helps. as such there are a lot of very cool battery technologies in various stages of commercialization that will never go in a phone, but make a lot of sense when you scale them up to a few thousand pounds.

What kind of storage is falling in price faster than batteries?

CAES, ammonia synthesis, hydrogen electrolysis...

Everything comes down as manufacturing volume goes up.

Everything comes down, but it's hard to compete with >95% over 25 years.

Battery cost is not falling as fast as it was. The others have only just started down.

>the overwhelming majority will not be lithium

I'm seriously hoping that aluminium-chalcogen batteries [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04983-9] can be scaled and commercialized soon

There are lots of exciting battery chemistries, and some boring ones. It is impossible to say which ones will win out, in the end. The one thing certain is that whichever wins will have the best performance per unit cost, and thus better than all the others.

Other exciting chemistries include molten antimony/calcium, zinc/bromine, and iron/air. The antimony/calcium one would never wear out or catch fire. Zinc/bromine is most compatible with current lead/acid battery tech. Iron/air is very, very cheap. None are very attractive for cars, so utilities will not be in competition with the car industry for access to batteries.

> Alchemy is not a solved problem, and there is only so much lithium to go around.

We can make it -- in a fusion reactor :)

>So, we build storage and transmission.

Oh is that all. How could nobody have thought of this yet?!?!

Strangely enough, people have thought of it. Just not you.

> The cost of this much civil engineering will be very large

Remember they were replying to a claim that it would be "inexpensive"

The absolute cost of anything world-scale is unavoidably very large. Pretending serves no one.

At issue is how this cost compares to that. Renewables and storage costs, as big as they will be, will be overwhelmingly less than alternatives, and can be fielded faster.

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