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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

If the actual source is extremely powerful, does the efficiency matter? The whole life on earth is solar powered since billions of years and it works very well and organisms did develop efficient energy storage for the times when the sun isn't shining.

IMHO solar is a proven source of energy that just needs more engineering to improve practicality. It kind of feel like we are getting there.

What I would like to see is nuclear power dedicated in producing solar energy hardware. After all, these things are not exotic and it's matter of putting energy into converting some abundant raw materials into solar cells.

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I think that efficiency does matter. If a government/utility company/whoever wants to spend 100M on fixing climate change, they have a choice between building a new solar farm or building a new nuclear reactor. One of them will be able to displace more fossil fuel burning than the other.

Efficiency also matters for costs. If we use inefficient methods of generating electricity, the electricity will cost more. This affects us as direct consumers of electricity, but also in consumer prices in general, since everything costs energy to make & transport.

Efficiency matters of course but it's just one of the variables in the equation.

The thing about solar energy is that the source is so powerful and abundant that the dominant factor for its economical viability is our ability to produce devices to capture it.

When nuclear is getting more expensive over the years(as the completely safe reactors prove to be not that safe and more safety is introduced), the devices used to capture the solar energy have been getting cheaper and cheaper. So it doesn't matter if solar is half the efficiency of something else if we can make the devices to capture the solar 10x cheaper.

Solar has already become very cheap, what we still need to do is to figure out the storage. So far the success is limited but because all life on earth is doing it already, I think it's a solvable problem.

For 100M you get huge solar farm ready to go in a couple of years or 1/100th of a nuclear plant which might come online in 15. Investing in Nuclear is in reality prolonging our reliance on fossil fuels.

Solar and wind are intermittent sources of energy and Nat Gas, Coal or even Nuclear are needed to back solar/wind when they don't work, which is 70-80% of the time!

You can see here (wind energy generation is the red one) how crazy it would be to think wind could replace gas/nuclear energy. And this is not a single wind tower but for the whole Ontario province.

https://i.imgur.com/XvOAF17.jpg

Notice how the animal and plant life on earth continues at night even if they don't use Nat Gas, Coal or Nuclear.

Because they store energy as fat. Electric systems can't do that.

In other words, they store the energy chemically. Interesting, maybe it is a clue how to make electric systems store energy when the sun isn't shining.

It's just not scalable yet. That's the truth of the matter.

> yet

There you go.

Correct but that means that no, we can't go all renewable right now. It actually means that when you add renewable, you're still about 70-80% dependent on natural gas (or coal) because of the very intermittent nature of solar/wind energy. And hydroelectric energy is (mostly, as some ecologist will protest) great but not scalable.

Not yet, but we're pretty close. We need about 300TWh of energy storage to decarbonize the grid, and about 300TWh to convert all transportation to EV. We currently produce about 1TWh per year of batteries, and that capacity is doubling every 14 months or so.

If only there were some source of dispatchable energy with a total annual limit in ontario and quebec, or some way of averaging the power from different renewable sources in different neighboring place.

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