Comment by snickmy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by snickmy | Hacker News Reader

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In UK wind is actually broadcasted to take over. After the new line connecting with Norway (for hydro storage) the majority of investments are going into wind. On Nuclear, I think right now there is 1 big nuclear plan offline for maintenance so there might be some of that too.

In the Mediterranean area, while there is more prevalence of solar, it's not a clear winner either. For instance in Italy there is quite an aggressive law on usage of agricultural space for big solar farms. Solar will win in the decentralized, domestic space, an area that I'm highly interested in. At scale, Wind seems to offer a better ROI, especially on country on the coast line (or other favourable morphological characteristic)

I'm heavily looking to switch to work on the space (from more traditional consumer products), but it's a more full stack space: software is written as a byproduct of the hardware. unfortunately I haven't found any Electrical engineering interesting in doing something in the space. Shameless plug if there is someone out there interested.

The Tories said no to onshore wind, now solar is getting really cheap they are banning the building of solar on most farms (by reclassifying low quality land as higher quality land that must be used for food).

At the same time they are thinking about allowing wind on land again (probably because it will no longer be the cheaper option).

Given their links to fossil fuel interests it comes across as delaying tactics.

> The Tories said no to onshore wind

That's actually changed as of this week https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-63880999

It's obvious why the Tories are thinking about allowing onshore wind again: a huge chunk of the mainstream media, including the BBC, have been pushing the idea that it's the superior option which the Tories are just ignoring because they're conspiring with fossil fuel companies to screw us. At this point it's probably not politically viable not to allow it even though it makes little sense. The BBC's been doing things like describing them as the "cheap, reliable" option every time they talk about the Torie sblocking onshore wind and omitting the fact that they're basically worse on both counts than the offshore wind the UK is building these days, repeating any claims the leader of the opposition makes on the topic verbatim and unchallenged, and even outright describing one of its big fundamental disadvantages as nonsense.

I read/heard somewhere that if the Republic of Ireland built all of their potential offshore wind-farms, it could power the country and generate a surplus for export. Obviously need to solve the storage issue or rely on interconnects for when the wind isn't blowing/blows too hard.

The east coast around Dublin (fortuitously, as the major population center) has good banks in relatively shallow waters ~10-20km offshore (Oriel, Kish, Bray, Codling, Arklow banks). There are only 7 offshore turbines in operation today (Arklow, 2003 25MW, planned expansion deferred), but hundreds more planned within the next 5 years. Less wind than the west or north coasts, which is seemingly less amenable, but there is at least one bank planned for Galway. https://gis.seai.ie/wind/

there is a twitter account @UK_WindEnergy[1] that posts the percentage of total power on the UK National Grid that is being generated by wind about once an hour, and then once a day a daily wind % totals. it doesn't happen very often, but i have seen upwards of 60%! very heartening.

[1]https://twitter.com/UK_WindEnergy

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