Hacker News Reader

Comment by VintageCool | Hacker News Reader

If we were really serious about climate change, we'd build a ton of wind and solar and batteries, plus a ton of new transmission to get electricity from the windy and sunny places to our cities.

That's currently the fastest way to cut our greenhouse gas emissions.

View on HN

Renewable energy in the future is predicted that by 2024, solar capacity in the world will grow by 600 gigawatts (GW), almost double the installed total electricity capacity of Japan. Overall, renewable electricity is predicted to grow by 1 200 GW by 2024, the equivalent of the total electricity capacity of the US.

From a study on earth.org. Solar will also become 35% cheaper is expected by 2024.

Soon we will have too much solar. Which is a nice problem to have but still. In 2021 Dutch solar and wind produced >100% of the demand 0.4% of the time. In 2023 it's already 5%. It's not a disaster but the producers have to switch the plants off (due to negative el. prices). Which makes the business case worse - you are not making money at night, when it's cloudy or when it's too sunny. And they will add another ~7.5GW peak solar+wind this year (60% of demand)! Hopefully, someone can figure out what to do with all the extra energy (hydrogen? synthetic fuels?)

All this may become consistent: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-...

If we were serious about doing it with renewables, we'd skip the batteries and build as much green hydrogen capacity as possible, plus hydrogen pipelines to move it around. People who bring up batteries have failed to realize that winter exists, and in winter you will need far more energy storage than you can possibly achieve with batteries.

> People who bring up batteries have failed to realize that winter exists

They really haven't, and you really need to stop being so abrasive.

I know you can do that, because you've managed it at least once with me on this topic.

The green hydrogen stuff is happening, (like hydrogen pipelines across the Mediterranean) but it's not really a competitor to batteries, but a complement.

The primary use will be chemical and industrial and a demand sink for renewable power, then any use as electricity peak fuel source will be a bonus rather than the main purpose.

This ignores the part where no amount of batteries can actually solve the peak and valleys of renewable energy. Even partially solving this requires a truly ridiculous quantity of batteries, and likely equally absurd amounts of raw materials to build all of this.

Ultimately, this is just another unsustainable idea likely motivated by people who own BEVs. Same story as those that went after mass transit in favor of more electric cars. It's a classic example of people who have hammers and see everything as a nail.

There's lots of different combinations of solar, wind, batteries that will solve it. The lowest cost one likely has lots of solar and wind, and a small amount of storage, but it varies by location.

Here's a worked example for Eastern India:

https://www.wartsila.com/energy/towards-100-renewable-energy...

These people are simply lying. https://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/the-curse-of-the-d...

Real experiences have show you cannot do it. You will have periods of major blackouts.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com