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Comment by eloff | Hacker News Reader

You can build solar or wind plus some energy storage or long distance transmission to even it out for less than the price of nuclear and with income beginning quickly, not after 10 years. By the time nuclear projects started now complete, solar and wind will be mopping the floor with them ROI wise. Far from being a lie, we're in danger of them becoming the only game in town, for better or worse. Nuclear had so much potential, but we stopped investing and stopped innovating and it's unclear if it can ever catch up again. For our sakes, I hope so. More options are better.

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>By the time nuclear projects started now complete, solar and wind will be mopping the floor with them ROI wise.

Yes, it will take decades to restart large scale nuclear projects. So we lost more than 50 years.

With Solar/Wind it's not a question of cost or ROI. Solar/wind, as an intermittent and diffuse energy source, CANNOT power a modern economy. It needs base-load.

Building a modern zero carbon economy based on renewable energies is not only possible but also close to cost competitive to the nuclear-intensive alternative [1]:

>>> Regarding the evolution of technology costs, under the baseline scenario, the cost difference between the M23 (renewable only) and N2 (old and new nuclear + renewable) scenarios is close to 10 billion euros a year (0.3% of France's GDP).

This is a quote from France's mostly nuclear based electric grid agency.

Losing 0.3% of GDP but avoiding any inherent social, environmental and economical risk associated with nuclear does not look bad to me.

[1] https://assets.rte-france.com/prod/public/2022-01/Energy%20p...

>Building a modern zero carbon economy based on renewable energies is not only possible but also close to cost competitive to the nuclear-intensive alternative [1]:

Oh yeah? Point me at an example.

This is not a question of ROI. Wind/Solar could be free and still could not power a modern economy. There are no economies of any significant size (say, larger than a mid-size city) that are powered by wind/solar. There are no economies that have plans in the near-to-mid term to be powered by wind/solar. Why was Germany, up until recently, investing billions to ship Russian gas for decades if wind/solar is just around the corner?

So what are we talking about here?

You can achieve that steady grid by over-building wind+solar, interconnecting larger areas of grid, as that naturally smooths out the variability as the system gets larger and more diverse, and adding storage. Storage is not quite there yet, cost efficiency wise, but it's less of a stretch to believe it can get there, than it is to believe nuclear can be made cost competitive.

>You can achieve that steady grid by over-building wind+solar,

No. You can't. There are times when you get neither wind nor solar. Overprovisioning isn't going to do anything for you there.

What about if storage improves? Can't that smooth out the intermittent nature and provide for the base load?

To be very honest, I feel like the car culture in the US gives every household a potential large battery to sustain their house with. In a future where every car is an EV, every American house has two giant batteries, if not more, hooked up to it all night.

If you use your car as battery during the night it won't have energy in the morning when you need it. It defeats the purpose of having a car.

Modern Teslas can store double the daily usage of a US average household. And that's assuming you have literally zero generation at night (hydro / nuclear / geothermal / pumped storage ).

But what happens in the morning when people wake up to an empty car battery and they need to drive to work?

A) How much electricity do you think is consumed at night? ( US average daily consumption is 30 KWh)

B) How much electricity do you think can be stored in a car battery? (Tesla batteries are >= 50 KWh )

C) What happens to existing sources of renewable power that will continue to operate at night? ( They can still provide a baseload that accounts for any shortfalls )

>What about if storage improves?

But it isn't. There is no storage solution that is able to bridge the intermittency gap to make wind/solar workable for a modern economy.

Storage needs to improve by a few orders of magnitude to make that possible, and it's not clear that we even know what storage technology to use.

Isn’t the base load required a fraction of our current coal/gas usage? Let’s get there first before complaining about solar/wind. (Though I’m also fully in support of more nuclear too)

"base load" is a myth.

OK. Don't focus on the semantics. There are times when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow - what do you do then?

You do the very same things that electric grids has been successfully doing for the last 40 years:

- Exchange electricity with other network on national and international level to balance out the load.

- Modulate big industrial loads. It's standard practice in many countries to have fine-grained tariffs for large consumers that are willing to adapt to fluctuating energy availability and prices.

- Modulate residential consumer loads around house and water heating. Many countries have been doing day/night tariffs for decades and people store energy as heat using boilers and storage heaters.

- Store energy using pumped hydro & similar

And now we can also start modulating consumer loads more precisely using smart appliances and charging EVs at the best time of the day.

Also, despite the FUD around wind/solar the reality is that:

- currently most countries have excess energy during the night rather than not enough. In general, using more solar would help rather that create a problem!

- solar+wind combined are not going to drop down to 30% for a whole day or week in a whole continent, only on a local level. You can find detailed statistics online.

- solar is very cheap and can be overscaled to compensate for low production times

- many industrial loads can be made more flexible if that means cheaper electricity on average

As long as you build 5-10x redundancy for solar/wind I don't see it, solar and wind are all over the place between the peak and valley outputs. Unless we find a "battery" storage technology that can smooth it out over say a couple of weeks, I don't think countries are going to go for it as the only grid power source. We have nuclear now, and climate change is a huge deal to solve, possibly end of human civilization huge. Note I didn't say solar and wind wouldn't be part of the mix,but as the sole source, it's not going to happen with a 10X or better leap in battery technology (energy density)

Where does your 5x-10x number come from? I sense that it's a guess, but the cool thing about stats is that we can actually find a redundancy ratio for a given probability of shortage.

Because at best, Renewables run at 20% percent of their installed capacity comparing to more 80% for nuclear.

You are confusing efficiency with some other metrics. Solar is 20%, but there is no point comparing it to efficiency of gas or nuclear - it's apples to oranges.

It totally makes sense because you always compare price of installation against a certain installed capacity in TW.

I was not speaking of the efficiency of transforming 20% of the sun energy into electricity.

So what that 20% means in case of solar? Utilisation factor also doesn’t make sense - what matters is how many GWh you van get per dollar of installation, but you don’t measure this in %.

How about using solar/wind to synthesis hydrocarbon fuels and use that as the storage medium?

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