Hacker News Reader

Comment by tjansen | Hacker News Reader

The issue is the amount of storage required. It depends a lot on the country, but here in Germany I think everybody agrees that we need to store enough energy to power the whole country for at least 2 weeks before we can get rid of fossil fuels. That's a lot of batteries. And currently there's not enough storage for a single hour...

In these dimensions, resource availability becomes a limiting factor. Pumped hydro requires a lot of space and geography that many countries can't provide. It may be an option for Norway or Austria, but not for Germany. And even if Germany would buy the planned world production of lithium batteries for the next 10 years, we still wouldn't have enough. The math just doesn't work out for both. Hydrogen looks more realistic, but is not a mature technology at the required scale.

View on HN

> we need to store enough energy to power the whole country for at least 2 weeks before we can get rid of fossil fuels.

Maybe this is self-obvious, but "get rid of" seems to be carrying a lot of weight in that statement. I personally am not offended or concerned by keeping natural gas generators around for decades, even, as insurance for catastrophic disasters, if in practice they're unused 99% of the time because storage infrastructure has reached 24 hour capacity. We reach diminishing returns on increased storage.

There is, in fact, no need to "get rid of fossil fuels", and no plan or desire to do so. So all the remaining claims are irrelevant. NG backup for renewables will remain. More storage mean burning less frequently, which is a pure good.

Pumped hydro storage does not, in fact, require "lot of space". Hydro power generation needs a watershed. Pumped hydro can reuse existing hydro infrastructure, but does not depend on it, and does not suffer its failings. Pumped hydro needs only a hill.

There will be no need to repeat the cited falsehoods.

Finally, a multitude of practical storage methods are being deployed. Batteries are the most expensive, so are only ever used for very short-term storage. NG backup for renewables works and will continue working; storage forestalls need to use it, decreasing opex.

So simply plan really, overbuilt massively on renewables. Then build a while bunch of storage. And then also have inactive low utilization natural gas plants and infrastructure.

Germany will spend like 40 years building this massively complex production system with massive overcapacity of solar and wind, quite a bit of storage, natural gas backup and lots and lots of distribution networks to move around power everywhere requiring a massively complex to operate country wide grid.

Man o man, France in 70/80s solve the same problem with 60 technology and it took them less then 20 years. The mostly build the nuclear plants on sits of existing oil plants and didn't even need to make their grid complex. And they didn't even want to produce green electricity, they did it by accident.

Really hard to see what the better plan is. Germany could have literally had 100% green energy by now if the 'Energiewende' had gone with nuclear, but instead they will spend the next 20 years shutting down their remaining nuclear, then shutting down all their remaining coal, and also building more gas plants.

Brilliant plan really.

If you take a moment to read what you replied to, you will see that your each assertion is directly disposed of there: there is no need for "massive overbuild" of renewables, or for much storage. The backup NG infrastructure is already in place and in use, and will continue working.

Germany's only problems just now are that Russia turned out to be an unreliable supplier, and their renewables build-out is incomplete. Both are being dealt with.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com