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Comment by rhaway84773 | Hacker News Reader

On a night when wind output was particularly low.

Another way to put this is that variable sources of energy are variable.

Particularly low output can happen for a whole month. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-29/dearth-of...

Of course and that needs to be factored into renewable supplies which massively increases their cost. When you have periods of Dunkelflaute you potentially need to have full grid redundancy either through inter-connects, other energy generation sources or battery backup, none of which are cheap.

It's rare to see flaute all over Europe at the same time. You just need some ways to transport energy as well as supplement that with storage and you can compensate most of this.

If this sounds too complicated an engineering challenge then let's not even start to talk about the engineering challenges that would make nuclear safer than it is today. That's a whole different ballpark.

What if Europe is at war and some infrastructure gets destroyed. Don’t we need extra buffer capacity in case we’re experience what Ukraine had where power stations are actively targeted. Or undersea windmill park power cables are threatened to be cut.

Unlikely but there is someone with aspirations somewhere in Russia.

Good example with Ukraines power station that's actively targeted. What type is that one? It's a nuclear plant as I'm sure you know. Which basically the whole country depends on. I think if anything then that's a counter argument. The more centralized your infra is, the more vulnerable it is. Nuclear is the most centralized of all power sources.

>Of course and that needs to be factored into renewable supplies which massively increases their cost.

It is and it does but being 5x cheaper means even a massive increase in cost still doesnt put it in the same league as nuclear power.

It has to be way more than 5 times cheaper to compensate the drop to single digits capacity percentages like last winter.

That doesn't matter because it's not like you can double renewables to increase redundancy (no wind is no wind no matter how many turbines you have)- you need another more expensive energy source as well.

To cover the drop in generation for the night of April 15, even 400% wind capacity would not be enough.

It was a rather regular, quiet, night in a nation of 80 million people in the middle of Europe. Which means that it was a quiet night across much of Europe.

As if there would be just one way to compensate this.

- More renewables can be added

- Storage can compensate for this

- Power can be distributed across large areas

- The amount needed at night is not fixed. It only appears fixed because we don‘t care so much. It can be reduced significantly by using devices and processes in a smarter way depending on the availability of power.

Oh and while we're about it interconnects just increase the systemic risk of multiple regions experiencing Dunkelflaute at the same time. And it's not enough to say that this almost never happens because in a system that expects many 9s of availability almost never is just not acceptable.

Storage can provide base load and for anything non-critical you have flexible pricing that automatically lets people stop doing things that can be done later the week, like charging your Tesla. Markets work. Use them.

Indeed, on all counts; it's just that the easy-obvious-and-suboptimal solution (LiIon batteries which are the worst solution you don't have to explain to anyone) are on-par with the cost of nuclear.

Until we have energy storage orders of magnitude cheaper than we do now, a power source is only as good as its minimum output.

And variability is very bad. What are you going to do, stop using electricity because it's not windy?

Nah, the solution is to start burning coal, oil and gas, or leech off your neighbors who hopefully use something cleaner.

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