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Comment by TheRealPomax | Hacker News Reader

Have... have you lived here? Solar makes zero sense in most of Europe: most of the year it would barely trickle charge the grid. Yeah, it'd work brilliantly at small scale for a few months every year, but grid storage is measured in "at most a few days", no technology exists that would make solar even remotely sensible in most of Europe. And no, "building it where it's sunny, then sending it on" would be nowhere near enough to cover the rest of Europe. People did consider that. Then they actually ran the numbers. Then they went "oh... okay that's never going to work".

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Solar is being rolled out like crazy and the main constraint is not the available sunlight but rather getting a connection to the grid. In fact if you look at where there's the most solar power in Europe, it's north western Europe (Benelux + Germany) even though one might expect it would produce more in Southern Europe

Global Solar Atlas* gives a pretty good overview of the gains from solar that can be expected depending on latitude. North of France solar just isn't very efficient so to get a decent amount of power out of it would require setting up solar farms across large areas. Maybe setting up solar in pasture would work, but good luck getting that past the NIMBYs.

Wind is more attractive, but needs tons of infra work to be a proper solution and the power of atom can't be harnessed because of the stark lack of research and knowledge, the heavy upfront costs, and shenanigans from so-called "green" parties.

I'm guessing the politicians' battle plan is basically "hope someone else fixes it and lets me take credit."

* https://globalsolaratlas.info/map

The map highlights a future of power cables through Turkey and Spain with North Africa and the Arab states providing power sourced from the sun, with additional solar -> ammonia -> transport -> storage -> hydrogen -> baseload generation.

Details aside it's much like today, with the massive gas lines to Russia out of the picture (transformed and redirected if you will).

It's a big shift, yes, but on the scale of what has been done before.

This is because of extreme subsidies. In the Netherlands people can still subtract the solar power they feed back to the grid from their bill on a kWh basis. This is called "salderen". It's pretty unfair because the power is fed back when it's cheap and the people without panels (or that can't have them) are paying for it through higher prices and taxes. Because obviously the energy companies aren't charities so they make up the difference one way or another. And in winter these panels aren't very effective there.

Meanwhile here in Spain where solar panels would do a lot more good there aren't many due to lack of incentives. I don't think they should do the same kind of feedback incentive but it would be great if they'd subsidize the purchase price which is much harder to stomach due to Spain's much lower salary standards. And of course these are great to power air conditioning which is pretty much a must in Spain whereas the Netherlands needs more energy in winter for heating. So a net win for the environment.

You’re missing the point. I worked on a project years ago that used incentives to drive PV installations when the ROI wasn’t great.

Basically a $50M in annual small scale solar incentives saved ratepayers something like $600M in excess capital costs because it reduced peak demand. For electricity, the hottest week of the summer costs more than the coldest month. The more you can maximize usage of the big power plants off peak, the lower your rates go and the more efficient you are.

Being against solar is completely nuts.

> For electricity, the hottest week of the summer costs more than the coldest month.

This is true of the USA, but is not true about Europe, where few people have AC, and you only see the sun a few hours a day.

Europe sees more of the sun than the US in summer, being on average further North. I am not sure about what you are trying to say. Completely agree about the general lack of AC, though.

Uh, there is a positively huge difference between, say, Sweden and Greece. Sweden has almost no AC, Im sure Greece has a lot. Also a silly difference in insolation during winter. Ive seen on http://app.electricitymap.org/ that Greece has had some VERY good days for solar production lately, like above 60% of installed capacity. I suspect the installed capacity is not updated with reality, or theyre very lucky. Sweden produces maybe a few % of the summer figures at the moment.

That lack of AC won't last much longer. I'm admittedly at about the same latitude as the most southern tip of Germany in Romania. I doubt I'll last more than another year in August without installing AC for all rooms.

Also ask the Greeks. Or Italians. Or the Spanish or southern France.

Incidentally, with this warm winter I'm paying more for heating than my largest heating bill ever, that happened in a -20 C month. And that with government capped heating prices.

> Being against solar is completely nuts.

We don’t have a silver bullet. I wish people would just understand this simple fact. Most of these pro-this or anti-that positions are purely ideological and without regards for actual facts.

The absolute priority and necessity is to get out of fossil fuels. Solar cannot be enough for Europe, and building large solar farms in most places is nonsense, but at the same time it needs to be developed where it does make sense.

Exactly. It’s a solution, not the solution.

Then for you too: have you been here? Yes, there are a few countries for which Solar will work, and more countries for which a massive Solar investment will never pay off. But you know what will? Wind and hydro. You know what's already been constantly getting invested in? Wind and hydro.

Being against renewables is completely nuts. Being against solar in places where solar is a dumb idea for most of the year, and we could spend the same money on better green alternatives is being perfectly sensible.

Build solar installations where there's a reliable amount of sun, for most of the year (and each country where that's the case already has solar projects going). And then understand that even if you do that, the benefit will be local rather than EU wide because there simply isn't enough Europe that matches that description for solar to be the only renewable you can think of.

When I go to https://model.energy/ and model what's the cheapest way to provide baseload using wind and solar (and batteries and hydrogen) in Germany, the minimum cost solutions use quite a lot of solar. Hell, if I do the same for Sweden there's still quite a lot of solar in the mix.

From the site:

"This is a toy model with a strongly simplified setup. Please read the warnings before interpreting the results. In particular: [Very long list]"

Hydrogen as storage is still very far into the future.

To take some numbers it suggest for Sweden if we remove hydrogen storage, we just need 800% wind overcapacity, 400% solar overcapacity and 100% grid capacity battery solution.

And your objection to that conclusion is? The model is using real historical weather data. Without hydrogen, covering seasonality and rare prolonged dark/calm periods could become very expensive.

No one solution needed to be be total. It’s been 11 months and the concern has already shifted to next winter that’s a long time for wind/solar to be reducing demand for natural gas turbines. Burning less gas in July let’s you have that gas to burn in January assuming you have storage capacity.

My point is the plan seems to be “let’s just import it whatever the cost” rather than saying what can we do to minimize the need while also increasing imports.

> Burning less gas in July let’s you have that gas to burn in January assuming you have storage capacity.

Britain has bulldozed all of ita gas storage, we are all neoliberal just-in-time supply chains believe in the market.

If the rest of the world stops supplying Britain with energy snd food there will be frostbite and famine in 1 week

Ge5ting planning approval for a wind turbine takes 5 years.

During the energy crisis, conservative government has moved to make solar illegal on agricutural land

That’s just not true. Solar makes sense even in the far North, North of the arctic circle. I ran the numbers and deployed, it’s been profitable since day 1.

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