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Comment by 0xy | Hacker News Reader

The biggest scam of renewables is not the viability of the technology itself, but the lie by omission that all renewables require baseload power which always happens to be non-renewable. The massive expansion of gas peaking plants in Germany, Europe and the rest of the developed world is the prime example of the lie.

Statistics are presented about the benefits of renewables, which seemingly never include the environmental destruction of the gas peaking plants propping them up.

If you counter with 'what about batteries', the lie by omission shifts from environmental destruction to child slavery. Battery supply chains cannot escape the contaminant that is child slavery.

Of course, this is while the West agreed to give China and India free reign to build unlimited coal plants until 2030.

Why can't renewables shake these fundamental deceptions? You're either hiding emissions (gas) or hiding child slavery (batteries).

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I don't know, I think everyone is aware that storing excess energy surplus from renewables is an unsolved problem and you are moralizing and making the debate by choice of strong words (lie, slavery) unnecessary emotional.

There's an article about flywheel storage on hn front page right now. Not saying this solves the problem but it's an interesting contribution.

Flywheel batteries have been proposed many times in the last 15-20 years, and there's a good reason none of them have gotten off the drawing board. They are very dangerous and not very energy-dense.

>I think everyone is aware that storing excess energy surplus from renewables is an unsolved problem

It's not everywhere a problem, a really old solution is:

https://www.iflscience.com/giant-water-battery-in-the-swiss-...

And if you don't have much water that could be a solution:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_battery

> The biggest scam of renewables is not the viability of the technology itself, but the lie by omission that all renewables require baseload power which always happens to be non-renewable. The massive expansion of gas peaking plants in Germany, Europe and the rest of the developed world is the prime example of the lie

Peaker plants are not baseload power. Baseload power means constant output, peaker plants are by definition variable output. You should also take into account that renewables+peaker plants replace coal plants in Germany, the emissions are reduced compared to before.

If emissions are reduced, emissions are not zero. That's the fundamental lie.

>Peaker plants are not baseload power

Not according to reality. [1] Gas has been producing consistently on a daily basis for over a year in Germany. Natural gas is used to prop up baseload generation in Germany and practically every region it's used.

[1] https://www.agora-energiewende.de/en/service/recent-electric...

This is willfully ignorant. Yes it has been used, but that was not its design function. I'm not justifying its use, but it's unfair to qualify it as de jure baseload when in reality it may be temporarily de facto base load.

> If emissions are reduced, emissions are not zero. That's the fundamental lie.

What are you trying to say here? That reducing emissions is not good? That only 100% reduction is good and anything less is bad? That's quite a strange point of view to have.

If you market a product as renewable it is absolutely an egregious lie to forget to mention that the product requires the construction of gas plants which are not renewable.

Wind and solar are marketed and sold as emission-free. Meanwhile, while countries pat themselves on the back, they're building brand new gas plants.

'Renewables + gas' is not even close to emissions-free, especially not when Germany has gas plants firing literally 24 hours a day for the last year or more.

I'm not quite sure what point you're trying to make? This isn't some kind of big coverup. Pretty much everyone is aware of the fact that most renewables suffer from intermittency issues. These issues can be somewhat smoothed out over larger geographic areas (e.g. there's always wind somewhere), but until we can build better storage systems, there's no panacea here. Or anywhere else.

We're also quite keenly aware of the downsides of other energy sources. You could equally argue that there are many lies of omission related to fossil fuels or nuclear.

In Germany “intermittency issues” are not only ignored but denied at the top. If carbon emissions are the biggest threat we face, there are two choices: nuclear or deindustrialisation.

I'm getting the impression that "the top" has already decided to go with deindustrialization. I hope to be proven wrong.

They chose coal for now and lng. That’s why those who want to follow the 1.5 degree limit protest.

And that's why the workers at Kostal in Iserlohn are now out of a job. Doesn't really matter what was chosen if you can't afford it, unfortunately.

> Statistics are presented about the benefits of renewables, which seemingly never include the environmental destruction of the gas peaking plants propping them up.

There are quite some ways of providing backup for wind and solar: ordinary hydro power and geothermal energy for base load, pumped storage hydro power, hydrogen conversion and tidal power for peaks. And even gas plants aren't that problematic either - assuming you only need them for peaks instead of, like now, replacing broken-down French NPPs, you can fire them with bio-gas gathered from farm animal dung or bio-waste.

> If you counter with 'what about batteries', the lie by omission shifts from environmental destruction to child slavery. Battery supply chains cannot escape the contaminant that is child slavery.

Of course they can, it is only a matter of money and oversight over governments.

Hydro power can only be used for base load power generation in pipe dreams.

Take the case of Tasmania, Australia. Tasmania is generally an energy exporter, and receives 100% of their power via hydro. In 2016, unexpectedly low rainfall led to serious supply issues in the hydro plant powering the island. The solution? The government organized air deliveries of diesel generators to meet the shortfall. Diesel generators are worse than coal.

In mere months, Tasmania's 'green energy revolution' was desecrated by diesel. Decades of progress erased. Green image gone.

As for pumped hydro storage, same issue. If one of your variables is 'we get more than X rainfall', it cannot possibly be described as reliable enough for baseload power.

This is the problem. Green solutions get decimated by reality, and they're dutifully covered up by greenwashing propagandists. Don't look too closely at our diesel generators or gas peaking plants. Don't look at our battery supply chains.

Diversification is always important, and sorry but putting all your eggs into one basket (here, hydro power) is just plain bad.

Even nuclear is not a solution, just look at France and Switzerland who had to take down a lot of their nuclear capacity beyond the broken-down NPPs because they lacked cooling water.

A decent renewable power grid has to have a lot of different energy generation paths: hydro, solar, wind, bio-gas, tidal (where possible), geothermal, enough interconnection paths to other regions, storage (battery, pumped hydro, flywheel) and regularly tested backups. The backups may even be fossil, no one has a major issue with that, the key thing is that the backup capacity must never be assumed as a regular operational capacity. And obviously, the generation capacity has to be scaled in a way that assumes a decent set of overproduction as no kind of power generation has an availabilty/capacity factor of 1... if your total consumption is, say, 100 GW, you have to have at least 200-300 GW in generation capacity.

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