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Comment by jsilence | Hacker News Reader

Transportation of electricity around the globe is not neccessary. Electricity usage is considerably lower during nighttime. Thus solar and wind fit in with our natural rhythm quite nicely. And it is also produced near the place there it is being consumed. Another plus.

But still the author is right, we need ways to store electricity and we will also need a much more flexible grid than the one we have today.

The neo liberal FDP here in Germany is trying to kill off the solar market by drastically reducing the fee you get for feeding solar electricity into the system. But we already have net parity, therefore it is feasible to put up a photovoltaic system on your house, when you size it carefully and consume much of the energy by yourself. It simply reduces your utility bill. If this new technology really halves the price of modules, people for sure will continue installing new systems. Yay!

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Germany's solar stimulus is highly questionable. Sure, it gets solar panels installed on a large scale, but government forced diffusion of an innovation is a questionable idea. Pumping money in a relatively narrow market and creating an artificial demand situation leads to a lot of side effects, i.e. Germany's quasi-stimulation of the Asian component manufacturing market.

Compared to pumping money into pointless wars I think pumping money into subsidized solar panels is an excellent use of money. Sure there are many other ways to spend that money, and some of them may even be better.

But this is definitely long term thinking on their part. Already Germany is the current world leader when it comes to renewables as a percentage of total generating power.

As the price of power goes up this 'stupid' strategy starts to look smarter by the day.

I agree. And when people talk about the money required for solar being so much more than the money required for carbon based fuels they don't take into the costs of controlling the resources in the middle east, the costs to take care of the people with lung problems, the cost of cleaning up the gulf coast and all the problems related to that (not to mention the costs of similar problems worldwide, such as in Nigeria). I'm sure there are similar external costs to solar but I highly doubt they're nearly as much.

The problem is that these costs actually add to the GDP, which makes them look like a good thing, because they "make the economy grow".

Germany also shut down sth like 60% of their nuclear power plants in response to Fukushima hysteria, even thought in central Europe there are no tsunami, nor big earthquakes.

Then, January/February this year cold snap happened, and they had to buy power from neighborns that still have regular obsolete power plants, because they couldn't provide enough energy for themselves. Green energy means you hope for good weather or neighborns to have enough electricity.

Germany is now protesting Poland new nuclear power plant, when Poland is trying to change its dependence on fossil fuels (sth lik 96%, I don't remember exactly).

This isn't smart. This is hysteria-motivated energy policy.

Sorry, but you are not correct. During the very cold days this winter it was very sunny. Because of this, Photovoltaic could compensate. It went through the local media, that even though most of the nukuhlar powerplants were shut down, we could still export (!) electricity to our neighours. For exmple to France, where they are heating a lot with electricity and had a shortage because of the cold.

Bazinga!

Thanks. I remember reading it the way I've posted aboove, but now I can't find that article, and I've found corrections all over the web: http://enenews.com/scandal-germany-not-restarting-nuclear-re...

EDIT: one source http://rt.com/news/germany-reactors-cold-weather-927/

The reduction of the solar subsidy is right. It is not killing the solar market at all, but your new solar-panels on the roof of your house won't give returns as nice as 10% anymore. Also those returns are paid by every electricity consumer in the country which at the current rate isn't fair at all.

Also the adaption of solar panels on homes went far faster, then most people expected. The grids in single-family home neighborhoods simply are not designed to handle much power being fed into the system at this point. The problem is that at daytime, when the sun shines there is not much power needed in residential neighborhoods, since everyone is at work. This is why self-consumption is the desired use-case for solar-energy on family homes. That's why I think there is a market for home-control right there. -> "Start washing machine WHEN solar energy > X"

IMO, as long as the tax is inline with the actual external costs it of other forms of energy generation it's not a bad thing. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality) It's basically renaming a sin tax as a green subsidy but there is value in having that tax even if it's revenue is mostly wasted.

I agree in principle with the idea that carbon-based energy has a ton of negative externalities (megatons, in fact...), so there should exist a relative subsidy between it and green.

The issue is that creates even distortion between the energy sector as a whole and the rest of the economy, since fossil fuels are already subsidized (through not pricing in the negative externality) and we're adding a separate subsidy to green energy.

So we're distorting the market to favor creating green energy over reduced consumption of energy. When what's really needed is simply an effective tax on carbon, and then let people decide the most efficient way to respond.

I think they are taxing existing energy sources to pay for the subsidy so on net people using electricity pay the actual cost for green power and other sources based on the actual mix of energy sources used in production. It only the producers who notice the cost difference this tax / subsidy creates.

> Thus solar and wind fit in with our natural rhythm quite nicely.

It's not that nice, because power output from wind/solar plants is random (depends on things like cloud cover or wind strength) and it causes problems in power grid, where power demand must meet the supply exactly, or bad things will happen.

"Without Hot Air"[1] covers this, and other renewable-related issues quite nicely and with real data. I recommend it, it's a good read. It has some good ideas on how to solve power supply/demand problems.

On TED2012 there was a talk about a new kind of batteries designed to solve those kind of problems in the power grid; the video from the talk is not yet up, though (but I think it should be soon, at [2]).

[1] - http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/

[2] - http://www.ted.com/talks?lang=en&event=2012&duration...

power output from wind/solar plants is random (depends on things like cloud cover ...) and it causes problems in power grid, where power demand must meet the supply exactly

The biggest power cost for us in warmer climates is cooling. When the sun is out, we need lots of power; when it's not, not so much. Solar power sufficient to run A/C from rooftop panels costing less than grid electricity would be wonderful, lining up perfectly with the inconsistencies of available sunlight.

Especially if one would switch to heat pumps, which can do both heating and cooling, providing/removing 3 to 5 times more heat than electricity they use up to do so. Amazing technology, by the way :).

Most air conditioners are heat pumps configured to work in one direction, using outside air as a temperature sink.

(I realize that this is at least borderline pedantry)

Oh, I interpreted A/C as Active Current; my mistake. Thanks for pointing that out.

(I, for one, don't mind pedantry :))

I would start with better home design and energy efficiency enhancing improvements before throwing a Carnot-limited solution at the problem.

Last summer I ran an experiment. We live in a two story house in California. We usually see low temperatures at night (sub 70deg F) and highs in the range of 105+ degF during the day. At night I opened all of the windows downstairs and used a small industrial fan (about 2000CFM) to pump cold outside air into the house. In the morning I'd shut down the fan and close all windows.

I could get the lower part of the house down to below 70F on most days during the summer. Cold enough to have to wear a sweater. Even with the outside temperature hitting highs above 105+ the thermal mass of the house succeeded in maintaining a very comfortable inside temperature (max around 77F). We did not use the air conditioner at all last summer, saving tons of money. The fan costs pennies a day to run.

This summer I am looking at what efficiency improvements I can make to this arrangement. I'm itching to throw a micro-controller at it, but I want to learn a little more before I take that path. There's a lot to do in the roof. Think about it, you have this huge solar heat collector --the roof-- reaching ridiculous temperatures during the day and radiating that right into the house. Sure, there's attic insulation, but that's a ton of energy to deal with.

I'm thinking that some forced ventilation of the attic with a small fan might just do wonders.

>I'm thinking that some forced ventilation of the attic with a small fan might just do wonders.

Radiative barriers should also be on your list. It's essentially just mylar stapled to the rafters.

That only works in desert type environments (i.e. little to no cloud cover) where the temperature goes up and down each day.

Where I live if it gets hot it says hot, day and night. And most of the country is the same.

Although, obviously, incremental improvements are great even if only some people can use them.

You might be able to use the thermal stability you have underground to help cool the house. Granted, this is more expensive, but probably far less costly in the long run. The basic idea is to bury a heat exchanger (coils of tubing) deep underground and circulate a fluid to move heat from hot to cold.

You can use this two ways: You can use it to try to cool the house directly by embedding tubing in the floor/walls or some other approach. Or, you could use it to improve the efficiency of an air conditioning unit by providing supplemental cooling of the A/C unit heat exchanger coils.

When solar and wind power input is not meeting demand that seems like a good time to spin up the spare fossil fuel generators, at least as a transitional sort of thing. Maybe in the near future excess wind / solar power can be stored as chemical fuel, and burned during peak usage.

An 80% / 90 % cut in fossil fuel usage or higher would be a huge thing though!

I meant that it is nice in the coarse pattern. And yes, as said, we need ways to store energy and a flexible grid.

Whilst on a small scale they are very random, there are some good studies (sadly I don't have the references with me) that show that over large areas, they actually become quite predictable - so this is less of an issue than people think if you have enough coverage

Store electricity like this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turlough_Hill - pump the water uphill during daylight and let it flow down when needed.

Germany has a plan to use Norway as a huge energy store, adding pumping capacity to the hydroelectric plants.

Really? I would be very interested in reading more about this. Got any sources? (Preferably in English or Norwegian ;) )

There is a presentation here http://norwegen.ahk.de/fileadmin/ahk_norwegen/Dokumente/Pres... And an article here about building the necessary cabling http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/08/27/us-norway-seacable...

To be fair, one could equally frame what they're doing as removing the subsidy to people who put photovoltaic systems on their roof. Arguably that same money would have been better invested in research of improved solar technology such as this.

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