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Comment by cinntaile | Hacker News Reader

> Of course, renewables are great, I'm totally rooting for them. I just wish that they are actually, you know, available, instead of being only theoretically available and being used as a rhetorical device against nuclear power.

They are actually available, maybe Korea just doesn't want to build them? They don't play that well with constant output systems like nuclear so it would make nuclear unprofitable in the longer run. Although this obviously depends on the energy mix, maybe up until a certain percentage renewables would be fine for example.

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Tell me more about these available renewable energy sources that work when the sun doesn’t shine, the wind doesn’t blow and aren’t dependent on local geographical features being available.

It has been a long time since such a day existed. You are talking about a situation that is mostly theoretical. I could come around and claim that nuclear is also totally unreliable, with all the maintenance necessary and the cooling issues, especially in a heating world. Bullshit? Not exactly. Look at the issues France has been having with their reactors in the last 10 years, importing vast amounts of electricity from Germany.

I have a hard time seeing how this is relevant for what I wrote. Can you doublecheck to be sure you didn't misunderstand the context?

Admittedly the grandparent is somewhat ambiguous about what constitutes availability, but my point was that widely available renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar, are intermittent.

Sure, they're intermittent which is a downside but they still compete away constant output sources. I didn't mention it in my previous reply but it is possible to vary the output to a certain extent (depending on the technology), the problem is that the economics assume a pretty constant output. This equation doesn't add up in certain places anymore. Therefore I expect that we will have a lot fewer constant output energy sources and a lot more variable energy sources. This will be combined with a certain amount of storage, fossil fuel backup plants, systems to timeshift our energy consumption, probably more usage of district heating/cooling systems and a lot of other stuff of course.

That's why we have grids and storage. Perhaps you should investigate those before making definitive statements about what renewables can and can't do.

We have very little storage and the grids require electricity generation from something. With lots of HVDC connections we could conceivably move enormous amounts of electricity around on a continental scale and thereby reduce the need for storage. That would be great...

...but it still won't be enough. We need something that can produce power when renewables can't.

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