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Comment by rich_sasha | Hacker News Reader

Well it's good, and very happy, but seriously, what is going to power Northern Europe in winter? Burning gas which is somehow seen as green? Ginormous batteries storing summer energy through until April, which people inexplicably assume will become viable by extrapolating exponential growth? Or good old coal as a "temporary measure"?

IMO renewables as a backbone for energy generation in a random locale, over nuclear, are misguided. I fear they will replace maybe 60-70% of fossil, if that, then will hit a wall and we will keep on burning stuff to patch the holes, or will build nukes anyway for this purpose, at which point the renewables will have been a waste of money and time. Or maybe we will just all burn to a crisp before any of this matters.

I hope I'm wrong, because sure enough no one making energy investments seems to agree with me.

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I believe big cables will the the future... +-3 million volts and 30,000 amps DC makes a pair of cables each 2 feet thick which can deliver enough power for the whole of the UK, and then take that power from the equator to the north pole while losing only 5%.

The cable itself is expensive to make and hard to install, but I believe we will put cablemaking equipment onto a ship, and sail it at 1mph all the way from the equator to northern europe, with other ships bringing shipments of copper, steel, and polymers to keep it going.

The cable will be fed by lower voltage feeders, and voltage conversion done by stacked MOSFETS (600V MOSFETS, 5000 of them stacked, and all encased in polymer - at these voltages, air isn't a good enough insulator unless you have absolutely huge buildings.) Each stack can add or remove 300 megawatts of power from the cable - so you need a couple per powerstation or city

This sounds like an in pipe(/cable) dream... First, you need that pair of cables for the UK (assuming your math and physics work out). Then you need at least 10 times that for the rest of Europe. Then we have all those cables in the water, in different places at the coasts of sea bound countries. We need to then split all of it up and transport it inland into all those countries.

Even if the first part is even feasible, that second part is another world of hurt. Oh, and the part before the first part, where we fill Africa with solar to provide the world with electricity for 12-ish hours a day. The geopolitics of this all are going to be pretty much impossible to figure out and that's before any actual engineering can even begin to be done.

Undersea power cables are already very much a thing, and energy transport across the grid is also very much a thing; Europe already has it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continenta...). You're describing normal, already implemented stuff with a sense of incredulity I'm not sure I understand.

At completely different scales than providing an entire country's energy needs through two cables. The UK currently has more than 2000 power stations providing balanced electricity throughout the country. The international transport is also for balancing, not for providing an entire country's energy needs from another country.

You can't just connect 20 cable's from Africa to the European grid and expect it to work, that's not how the grid works. And I'm truly surprised that many people on HN seem to think it would.

Source: I work in utilities and one of my current focus area's is creating software to help expand the net to cope with the addition of new renewable sources and EV charging stations. And even that is posing a massive challenge on a relatively small and local scale. I couldn't imagine the impact of this fantasy of just plugging in some cables from Africa somewhere.

Edit: This incident is an example of how sensitive all this stuff is:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-27/green-shi...

Distributed power generation made sense when everyone used coal power plants - it was cheaper to ship trains full of coal than the power.

But if you want a carbon-free grid, then you can't ship the light or the wind. You either massively overbuild generation and throw most of the power away, build huge amounts of very expensive storage, or you ship the power.

Currently the world is headed towards overbuilding, but thats only because typically private companies build power generation, whereas power transport is mostly in the realm of governments, and governments are slower to act on market forces (and often aren't great at capital efficiency).

The end result will clearly be a mixture of all 3, but we're going to see a lot more power movement in the next 50 years than we saw in the last 50 years.

All of that is correct, but I don't see how it's relevant to my argument that plugging a couple of cables into Europe is not a feasible solution and would take massive amounts of work in geopolitics, let alone the engineering to adapt the grid to make it possible.

And would be a heck of a terrorist target anywhere along its length.

Good point, an important part of the resilience of the grid is the fact that there are hardly any significant points of failure.

That's interesting. Not knowing much about electricity read somewhere that it goes ~500km max and was wondering how are they going to get it from Africa to Europe.

It ran into financial troubles, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link was to be 2,800 miles long.

The Morocco-UK cable mentioned in the article would be 2,400; "transmission losses for such a long cable will be relatively high at 13%". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xlinks_Morocco-UK_Power_Projec...

Hmm- finacial in the sense that at least one large investor went "Nope".

The underlying actual issue was the cable path .. not so much the length but the trip across a lively and still active earthquake | volcano | fault ridden region ( that spawned the Krakatoa eruption and others ).

The engineering, repeater stations, need for a "backup" cable (that was just as likely to break) etc just didn't add up.

The Singapore | Australia cable project may rise again - but for now exporting Australian sunlight is going forward via ammonia shipments.

Yes; the point is that mere cable length doesn't seem to be an inherently unsolvable physics problem.

The 500km max number was before people considered using voltages over ~400kV. Those higher voltages are now more feasible due to solid state power conversion and better insulators.

Also, 500km was a good economic number, because typically if you need to move power more than 500km, then it is better to build generation at the other end and ship the coal/oil there.

For my own situation in the Netherlands only december and januari are really low. In december 37kwH with solar, used 235. In januari about the same. In februari it goes up quick, generated about 100 kwh, used 200. From march on i'm in the + with generating solar.

So only the 4 winter months here should be abridged or have excess solar power (4 times as much) as normal. This is with a insulated house etc.

In Western Massachusetts I have an all electric building heated with air sourced heat pumps.

December through March is when I buy electricity. I now have documented how KWhs or BTUs I need to eliminate the massive heating load. Last August the Governor made a new deal for better pricing of the electricity I deliver to the grid. This year I will see a much higher income for my excess summer production. I will re-invest this into more production.

The real problem with solar is only a few months of the year. Isolating the problem of energy production and storage to only those months demonstrates how close we are to a new energy future. My next step will be solar thermal install. I want a more passive method for heating as a backup.

My location 42.73226° N, 73.19623° W. I can provide five years of production data if people are curious.

The thing is, many houses (like my own) aren't insulated very well still. Also, you can't look at production and use over a month. We often have multiple cloudy days in a row where we produce next to nothing in comparison to what is used. So you need something to bridge those days. We do have wind and off-shore wind is relatively reliable, so that's good.

Solar is just awful for our climate, since we produce most when we use the least, which you can see in the quite extreme negative prices for electricity we've already seen this year... And it's not even summer yet.

Definitely insulation is key. The grid is key I think to smooth out the irregularly generation and the various power sources but over building solar and good planning for shedding snow is key.

In 2021 the array delivered KWh in roughly these groups 8 days over 300 KWh. 96 day over 200 KWh. 84 days over 100 KWh. 110 days over 30 KWh. 20 days over 10 kWh. 15 days at 0 and the rest between 1 an 9 KWh.

If I had the install to do over I would have prioritized a steep incline. The location I choose was easy to install but the panels angle is less the 15 degrees which collects snow.

You literally didn't read the first paragraph of the linked article, did you?

So, what, we'll draw most of the winter power from Morocco?

Aside from engineering feasibility, this is literally what bit Europe (Northern Europe in particular - go figure) in the backside: having a single energy supplier. Projects like this sound like nice marginal improvements, but you wouldn't want to bet your whole economy on good relations with Morocco.

It is on fact worse since oil and gas can be transported with some difficulty, Germany muddled through in the end. But you won't be able to magic out new cables at this scale. And anyway where would they lead?

I think the bulk of energy must at least be produced in the EU, with all the limitations it entails. Or else be fungible with many third parties.

The article:

> Power delivered by the ‘GREGY Interconnection’ cable will serve grids in Greece, Italy and Bulgaria.

The comment:

> what is going to power Northern Europe in winter?

You literally didn't read the first sentence of the comment, did you?

The article discusses lengthy power cables going from Morocco to Britain.

Extending those to Northern Europe doesn't take that much imagination.

The question is still relevant.

You cannot lay a 2000 mile subsea cable from Greece to the Nordics.

The Nordic grid is separate from the Central European grid and interconnection capacity is limited.

Time to let your imagination fly. What’s your solution?

> You cannot lay a 2000 mile subsea cable from Greece to the Nordics.

Sure, that makes it easier, not harder. Interconnection capacity can be expanded. The Nordic grid is already connected (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Northern_E... ; 11 interconnections are listed), just not synchronized; they can and do exchange power just fine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_super_grid details all sorts of proposals in this regard, some of them currently being implemented. Like I said, not much imagination necessary; others have already gotten it well past that point.

> Sure, that makes it easier, not harder.

  Tell that to the folks actually building these transmission networks.

> Interconnection capacity can be expanded.

  Sure. Finland is adding an additional 1000 MW of capacity to Estonia. It's expected to be ready for service in 2035.

  In case you didn't notice, that's less than a nuclear power plants worth of interconnection capacity in a decade.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_super_grid details all sorts of proposals in this regard

  That page is little much than fancy hand waving. What's more amusing is that you can also find the summary of a study from Finnish engineering firm Pöyry on the very same page that concludes the following:

"A report by Pöyry stated that a super grid would only partially reduce the problems from intermittent renewable energy production. While it found that spreading renewables across Europe produced a smoothing effect, large scale weather patterns would impact many European countries at similar times. This still results in large highs and lows of energy output."

> some of them currently being implemented.

  Which ones? Specifically which ones will add the required tens of GWs of interconnection capacity?

> Like I said, not much imagination necessary; others have already gotten it well past that point.

  That's putting it charitably. You need a rather large leap of faith from those hallucinations to a real solution.

> Tell that to the folks actually building these transmission networks.

I suspect they'll agree that overland transmission lines are far easier to build than undersea lines. (As long as you're not trying to do it in, say, Afghanistan.)

> While it found that spreading renewables across Europe produced a smoothing effect, large scale weather patterns would impact many European countries at similar times.

Yes, that's why building and interconnecting with solar farms in Northern Africa is being discussed.

> In case you didn't notice, that's less than a nuclear power plants worth of interconnection capacity in a decade.

One would presume they build according to actual need. It's pretty clear future capacity expansion of proven technology will be needed as use of renewables expands.

Isn’t it truly tiresome to see obvious questions voted to the top with answers right in the article or easily searchable. Why do HN commenters assume that they are the only person to think about these questions? It’s probably the most discussed and analysed topic of our time with an incredible wealth of professionals writing about it every day.

The downside of a tendency to apply first principle thinking to everything. My best guess so far.

> Well it's good, and very happy, but seriously, what is going to power Northern Europe in winter?

Wind, onshore and offshore. The North Sea is currently filled up with offshore wind parks. North Sea countries

Hydropower is popular in the Nordics, I believe. With pumped storage that could flatten the seasonal variation.

Overproduction of both wind and solar is also feasible. Winter production of solar is not nothing, it's just less. Scaling up the number of collectors will still get you more production.

Seasonal price fluctuations. Having summer electricity be nearly free can create business opportunities, whereas high winter prices will reduce demand from industrial consumers.

> Wind, onshore and offshore.

How about when the sun don't shine and the wind don't blow?

> Hydropower is popular in the Nordics, I believe.

Popular, but insufficient. Only Norway could ostensibly be run on hydro.

> Overproduction of both wind and solar is also feasible.

But is it economically viable?

> Winter production of solar is not nothing

Yeah, it pretty much is in the Nordics.

> Scaling up the number of collectors will still get you more production.

Nope. Zero times a large number is still zero.

> Having summer electricity be nearly free can create business opportunities, whereas high winter prices will reduce demand from industrial consumers.

Sure, business opportunities for end users. But is it sustainable?

With too much supply renewables make no money and other producers have to make all their money in the winter months.

> How about when the sun don't shine and the wind don't blow?

A rarity. Happens for a few hours a year, which can easily be passed with short-term storage.

> With too much supply renewables make no money and other producers have to make all their money in the winter months.

Renewables will have to recoup their investments in the winter, yes. Since it's predictable, it's not a big deal to have seasonality. Make a lot of money in winter to tide you over for the summer. Many industries work like that.

> A rarity. Happens for a few hours a year, which can easily be passed with short-term storage.

It's rather more than a rarity and for periods much longer than a few hours.

Case in point:

"European Wind Turbines at a Standstill Amid an Ongoing “Wind Drought” ... But as of recently, barely even a breeze has made its way through the through the winter air. ... "Britain is in the middle of a wind drought — and the timing couldn't have been worse. For several days now, the U.K. and western Europe have been calm, with barely a breeze," Thomas Moore writes for Sky News. ... Wind speeds in the U.K. have been rather slow recently, and this is impacting the country's ability to utilize wind energy.

According to Yale Environment 360, the phrase "wind drought" is exactly what it sounds like — it refers to an extended period of time that an area lacks wind, or experiences slower-than-usual wind speeds. In 2021, wind speeds were 15 percent slower than in previous years, making for one of the least windy periods in the U.K. in nearly 60 years."

https://www.greenmatters.com/news/wind-drought

> Renewables will have to recoup their investments in the winter

How is solar going to recoup its investment when it produces no power during the winter months?

A 15% reduction in wind isn't the same as "wind don't blow"; it's "we'll need to build out some extra capacity as a buffer".

> How is solar going to recoup its investment when it produces no power during the winter months?

No one's building solar farms above the Arctic Circle.

It’s definitely a problem. However reducing annual global fossil fuel usage by 70% is still huge and worth doing today.

In terms of the Northern Europe winter, wind, offshore wind, and solar from Africa will hopefully make up a lot of the shortfall.

Solar from Africa. So tying ourselves to very unstable region which is also in same pattern of production during day...

I think they may have used Africa as an example not as the only place.

Solar can be exported, for example, as pure hydrogen or potentially as hydrogen in ammonia, or possibly other easier to transport material (I'm not a chemist).

Places that receive high amounts of sunlight like Australia would also work for this.

As opposed to already tying energy needs to contested regions.

Interesting idea. I went and got chatGPT4 to help me do some back of napkin math and it looks like hydrogen won't be able to compete with coal which is probably between $50-$100 per MWh for Poland. Even assuming the electricity (the biggest cost factor in electrolysis) is free through some carbon credit initiative, the cost of producing 1 MWh of fuel cells is still over $100 and the cost of converting that back to electricity is $17. The cost of shipping is hard to estimate but could potentially be quite small - $1 per MWh.

Now if we could somehow raise the price of coal to account for its externalities.. by stipulating minimum taxes on coal and imposing tariffs on any countries that don't implement those... then we might have a chance.

But I think wind energy (producing or importing) is probably Poland's best bet for getting off of coal.

Hmm.. 1MWh of H2 is about 30kg, https://www.hydrogen.energy.gov/pdfs/20004-cost-electrolytic... claims $5/kg, which puts it at about $150. Seems reasonable.

I suspect doing it through economics alone isn't going to happen, instead some version of the Large Combustion Plant Directive will simply ban coal generation in Poland.

As with most markets, it will be a mix for the foreseeable future. There will be dominant players and minor ones, holes filled by suboptimal forms, etc. Even if nuclear energy were the dominant source, we would still be burning some fossil fuels. Optimization should be the goal rather than perfection.

What's interesting to me is that hydroelectric power generation pretty much dominates when it comes to over output per plant.

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

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

Yes, hydro's great. The problem is scaling; "that plant is super helpful, let's build ten more nearby" isn't possible like it is with other forms of power generation.

> or will build nukes anyway for this purpose, at which point the renewables will have been a waste of money and time.

If you decide to build a nuclear plant today, it might be finished by the time renewables deployed today have reached the end of their design lives.

(People will no doubt answer that it can be done quickly, and I urge those people to get on down to Hinkley Point C with a shovel to help them finish the thing)

I've been hearing this for decades.

Had we built nukes 20 years ago, the problem wouldn't be here today.

It's not a great argument.

A lot of it will come from hydro used as a battery. The power cables across the North Sea will send power north in the summer and south in the winter. That power will be used to either pump water uphill, or just to replace the hydro power currently being used in the summer.

The problem is that there isn't enough hydro. Only Norway has enough hydro to run the country.

Norway currently gets 90% of its power from hydro. If they didn't use hydro while the sun was shining and/or the North Sea wind was blowing, the combination would serve > 5X as many people. And if some of that solar and wind was used to pump water uphill, the number would get even igger.

Norway doesn't have enough interconnection capacity to do that.

And even if it did, the real issue is how to supply power when the sun don't shine and the wind don't blow, i.e. windstill winter days.

During such periods Norway does not have sufficient excess in hydro power generation to satisfy neighboring countries needs.

This is exactly the purpose of the North Sea Link and they are talking about building more.

Isn't there plenty of wind in the winter?

Also hydro, bio gas... And solar is working in winter as well, just a lot less efficient. But than there will still be a grid hetting electricity to those places.

It's just as efficient, there is just less incidence.

Not sure about the term but I would have assumed northern Europe is Scandinavian countries and they have ground heat, water and nuclear.

France already has plans for more nuclear.

We Germans might have issues but let's see what this really means in the next 20 years.

We have a huge gas network and every sun hour will keep those storage tanks full for longer and it should be predictable enough to get good prices

>> because sure enough no one making energy investments seems to agree with me.

Let's assume not every investment decision is following SoftBanks approach.

It'll likely be mostly be wind, hydro and nuclear. In that order. Not sure how this relates to the topic here though.

> will build nukes anyway for this purpose, at which point the renewables will have been a waste of money and time

Solar, wind, hydro, fission and fusion are all different, with different strengths and weaknesses. Building capacity for one source (making it cheaper in the process!) does not go to waste. Power plants will continue to operate continuously to recoup their capital cost.

A renewable-only grid is generally not the consensus view, just something Greenpeace pushes

With the $120 - 200/MWh nuclear costs, which is the averege price they require all year around, you can do many completely insane things from an energy efficiency perspective and still come out ahead.

https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-e...

Lazard's MWh costs are incorrect for nuclear.

Olkiluoto 3, Finlands newest nuclear reactor sells electricity for 40€/MWh. Even if you double that, to account for the French subsidy, you only end up at $86/MWh after currency conversion.

The same Lazard research report also states that: "Combustion turbines for 100% hydrogen are not commercially available today".

Given that you have to produce something other than hydrogen to produce clean energy this drives down efficiency further.

So, what are these completely insane things that you can do with renewable energy sources and still come out ahead?

I can confidently tell you that OL3 does not cost €40/MWh. The marginal cost for paid off nuclear plants are €25-40/MWh. The €13B construction cost ends up being more than €86/MWh, unless you decide to amortize it over 80 years or something insane.

> The same Lazard research report also states that: "Combustion turbines for 100% hydrogen are not commercially available today".

50% hydrogen already in use:

https://hydrogen-central.com/ge-new-gas-turbine-help-smooth-...

A DOE grant to get to 100% hydrogen:

https://www.ge.com/news/press-releases/ge-doe-accelerating-t...

No need to let perfect be the enemy of good. Make synthetic methane to get the hydrogen blend needed.

I see the same problems. I don't understand why we're still subsidizing solar. I hope we can harness tidal movements in some way, seems like the most consistent thing we're not really using yet. I have no idea whether that's even feasible though.

Most new solar is unsubsidized.

In my country there's still a 0% tax (which can be seen as a subsidy) and there's still what we call the 'salderingsregeling'. That last thing allows people to deduct the KWH they produce in summer from what they use in winter. This can also be considered a subsidy, even though it's not paid by government. Both promote buying solar. The last part looks like we'll finally start to get rid of from 2025.

The 0% VAT is just a way to get rid of some administrative overhead. Repeatedly selling something (like electricity) makes you a VAT-liable entity. You must charge VAT on what you sell, but you can deduct the VAT others charge you. That can go into the negative, giving you a tax refund. This is how VAT always works.

Then there are rules regarding smaller entrepreneurs. Those changed a bit in the past few years, but both before and after the changes there were rules making it so you don't have to pay VAT if you stay below a certain amount of revenue. Those amounts have always been well above what a typical residential solar installation earns.

So what happened was, some tax-smart type deducted the panels in their first year, and was planning to not pay VAT in later years. The tax service didn't agree with the whole "I'm an entrepreneur now" thing, and a court case was fought. The court agreed with the entrepreneur, so for years people could get their solar panels essentially VAT-free.

But it's pretty complex for ordinary people to do this. There were some specialized companies that could help with it, and installers would offer those services as part of their package. It was a mess, and they finally just said: let's just stop this "vestzak-broekzak" nonsense and set VAT to 0%.

So it's not a subsidy, it's a streamlining of an existing tax reality.

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