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Comment by thinkmcfly | Hacker News Reader

Uh, you can't run life saving medical equipment or refrigerator service on wind turbines. That means that all the bodies of people that die without ventilators etc, during no wind days would have no chilled morgue to sit in, and would rot

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There’s such a thing as energy storage and long distance DC transmission. Why does the old “intermittent power” argument crop up every time when there’s clear engineering solutions to those problems? Next thing you know you’ll be blaming regulations on lack of new nuclear and talking about how we’re running out of lithium, both of which are false arguments as well.

It crops up because people give these absurdly misleading cost estimates for adding incremental wind power to the grid. You can’t have wind power without spending money on an equivalent amount of reliable power, and no one wants to include those required costs in their estimates. This tends to dramatically understate the actual economics of wind.

There are plenty of studies of near-100% renewable energy grids and the electricity comes out similar to long-term wholesale trends (pre-Ukraine), even taking storage/transmission into account.

Let’s see one for wind power, then. OP implies wind is an order of magnitude cheaper.

How about this one:

https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/21-U...

With those 2 things combined into a solution, you're gambling that we will always have average good wind conditions long enough to keep the grid batteries from going empty. Sadly, under your proposed regime, as time approaches infinity the chance that the grid will run out of power approaches 100%.

If you could avoid straw-manning me about nuclear and lithium in the future that would be super cool. I've played enough factorio to know that green power and batteries are part of the best solution, but you need high energy density generation systems for fast advancement too! If we turn our backs on that tech we know works we will lose future opportunities, or at least delay them

If your local energy storage or grid isn't reliable enough, you can always have a backup diesel generator. Or hydrogen powered generator if you insist this is green. Or some solar cells on your roof. And as much fuel as your risk analysis demands. But the reality is, hospitals can rely on local emergency services for support, and it is likely more cost effective run the risk of spoilage in the rare event of a multi-day power outage than invest in local generation for your refrigeration. My guess would be local equipment failure is more of a risk than a multi-day renewable energy outage, even in latitudes where solar is useless.

> you can't run life saving medical equipment or refrigerator service on wind turbines

There are countries running on 95%+ renewable electricity right now[1]. Including wind, hydro, solar, geothermal and biomass. Humanity keeps neglecting what is already proved to work. Because politics? Coal and gas are cheaper options? Environment is not considered in the equation?

Edit: source [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewab...

> There are countries running on 95%+ renewable electricity right now[1].

That list ignores that countries trade electricity. If, say, Germany produces a lot of electricity by renewables it can sell the excess to France (which has lots of nuclear). If Germany is low on electricity, it can buy from is neighbors. The system as a whole is nowhere near 90%.

The one exception are probably countries that have all hydro and biomass.

You created a straw man. There are 10 countries that fit the 95%+ criteria, all of them probably have excess of production and have 0 interest in buying power. But yeah, what you say could theorically happen.

All large hospitals have emergency generators. Of course they are supposed to be for emergencies, not for dealing with regularly intermittent power. That is typically dealt with advertised in advance power shutdowns to residential areas, and in richest countries, by not sending the signal that remotely turns on your water balloon heater during cheap hours.

you can run life saving medical equipment or refrigerator service on batteries.

I think it's a standard thing for vital infrastructure to be backed by generators.

big industrial consumers can factor their own specialised requirements for storage, backup.

>Uh, you can't run life saving medical equipment or refrigerator service on wind turbines

Man! If only there was some device that stored energy for later use!

You gotta include it in the cost figures, though.

Wind has the distinct advantage compared to this tech in that it actually exists. I can buy a turbine tomorrow and have it online in a month or two.

Sure, but that's a different and unrelated argument to the question of theoretical cost which is what was being discussed.

Sure. This costs infinity because it doesn't exist and 100% wind based power generation would cost less than that, but more than a wind turbine by itself to include storage.

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