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Comment by throwayyy479087 | Hacker News Reader

Will be. Wind is the future of American energy. Every year it pulls farther ahead.

What's the American plan for baseline energy generation?

In the immediate term? 70-80% wind/solar works just great. Fill the remainder with gas plants or whatever else you got. Pick the high hanging fruit once that's done. If nuclear wants to bid for that, then great. But it's gotta be an order of magnitude cheaper if it wants a piece. Right now, quite frankly, it's looking like it's going to be cheaper to store the wind in batteries and pumped hydro than it will be to break nuclei for that energy.

Everyone wants to have this fight on the fundamentals, but everything is about tradeoffs. Nuclear isn't losing because of out of control woke hippies or authoritarian regulators, it's losing because it costs too damn much.

It costs too damn much _because_ of woke hippies and authoritarian regulators.

What is the plan to deal with nuclear plants going bankrupt? These reactors will likely go bust trying to pay off their loans. The government will need to bail them out and run the reactors.

Solar makes baseline generation unprofitable. Baseline depends on making money during the daytime when there is high demand, but solar is cheaper and takes the load. Baseline is left with the evening peak and storage is going to wipe that out. Baseline is left with the off peak hours which isn't enough profit to survive.

That is why coal power plants keep closing. Nuclear doesn't have the fuel costs but has expensive maintenance. If solar keeps dropping, it will be cheaper than paid-off nuclear power plants.

You can do it with renewables + storage, and not expensively compared to nuclear.

https://model.energy/

parent would probably say, "grid-scale battery storage". or natural gas.

Two very large grids. The wind is always blowing somewhere

If only. You can look at graphs of wind output for the big grids, CAISO and PJM. Over large multi-state areas, wind output varies over a 4:1 range in the course of a day. Wind needs storage.

Storage, or dispatchable energy, in whatever form is given, but is it 1, 4, or 12 hours?

I advise caution when claiming that the wind is always blowing somewhere. One does not hear a lot of discussion from the wind energy industry about the wind drought of 2015 in the USA and Canada. The 2015 event caused some of the lowest average wind speeds in fifty years.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2078374-mystery-wind-dr...

Climate change has proven time and again that these events will be more likely. What then?

Your link says that that lack of wind caused a loss of 14% of average generation (capacity +9%, generation -6%.) Overbuilding by 16% is a pretty easy task.

Uh... grid-scale failures of some kind happen in the existing fossil-based infrastructure far (far) more often than once every fifty years. That sounds like a solid numerate argument FOR wind to me.

Grid scale failures of some kind happen in existing fossil based infrastructure more often, but they are usually far less serious, outside of the nonsense which happened in Texas at least, you don't hear about people being without heating for weeks. If you do not have a backup for all that wind then you could have periods of weeks or months with not enough power.

> don't hear about people being without heating for weeks.

The linked article doesn't substantiate "without heading for weeks" either, where are you getting that frmo?

> If you do not have a backup for all that wind then you could have periods of weeks or months with not enough power.

Yeah, you're just making that up. Wind shortfalls are weather events. Weather events last days, not "weeks or months". And needless to say, no one anywhere except in your head is imagining a wind-only power grid.

> The linked article doesn't substantiate "without heading for weeks" either, where are you getting that frmo?

The hypothetical world you are putting forward where we get most of our generation from renewables with wind being a key factor.

> Weather events last days

Maybe if you live under a rock.

> And needless to say, no one anywhere except in your head is imagining a wind-only power grid.

Plenty of people are imagining power grids which heavily rely on renewables with only short term power storage capacity to smooth out problems and almost no natural gas/nuclear based power generation capacity.

Entire industrialized European countries are running on pure wind for days at a time. In the renewable energy space it feels like wind is not getting enough attention and solar is getting too much attention.

Wind combined with a long-range continent scale HVDC grid and effective energy storage could be enough to solve the modern energy demand.

Agreed. Solar takes up too much land, is more fickle than wind, and the economies of scale seem to be tapering off. Wind is at the _beginning_ of the cost curve, requires much less land/kw, and can be installed offshore. It's also less susceptible to damage categories like hail, and can be installed close to large consumers like NYC or SF in a way that solar cannot.

Massive overprovisioning of wind + grid scale storage + hydro will get us to 100% renewable. Solar will likely remain the domain of off grid houses, campers, etc. Maybe it will be a bigger deal in MENA than the USA.

People should go to Coastal New England and Kansas if they want to see extremely strong, consistent wind.

Once home batteries come down in price, rooftop solar will be a no-brainer for most households (especially when building new ones or when the roof needs replacing anyway). Payback times for rooftop solar are already around the 10 year mark, and that's in the UK where it's not that sunny.

Why pay for electricity when you can get it for free?

That's assuming we can keep up production in key materials, like copper, nickel, etc.

It takes a shit ton of water to process copper, often in places that don't have a lot of it like the Atacama region in Chile. To say nothing of the pollution that local residents face because of it.

Wind will never meet all of America's energy needs.

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