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Comment by Arbortheus | Hacker News Reader

A super cheap wholesale price on a windy day like this.

Past year average: £97.90/MWh Right now: £5.99/MWh.

Better transmission and storage tech or better ways to scale demand at different times will be a game changer here.

It was once said that nuclear fission would be too cheap to meter. Turns out, that promise will be met with fusion at a distance.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37502924 (citations)

(edit @ oezi: wind power is solar power)

Citations:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38762113

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/12/electricity-thats-too-cheap...

https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1613/ML16131A120.pdf

https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/students/history-10...

Solar alone won't cut it in the winter. We need wind as well.

While I prefer a mix of sources to avoid correlated black swan failures, technically you could power the world just fine with distributed PV and a sufficiently fat[0] wire connecting everything.

[0] 1m^2 cross section if it's aluminium

Hopefully they'll use plasma conduits instead and all the years of binge watching Star Trek and Stargate will pay off.

Or with hydrogen storage.

Why hydrogen? Aren't fuel-cells are notoriously low density storage medium for power?

Fuel cells don't store energy at all, so your point there makes no sense. Also, large scale hydrogen storage for the grid would likely use combined cycle power plants to convert the hydrogen back to electrical energy, not fuel cells.

Hydrogen is cheap for long term storage because underground storage caverns can be extremely cheap (solution mined in salt formations), less than $1 per kWh of storage capacity. This is how natural gas is often stored, after all. There are alternative e-fuels but they have various problems. Ammonia is touted a bit below this comment in these responses.

Ammonia.

You can store hydrogen underground. I don't think that would work as well with ammonia.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US2901403A/en

https://www.oxfordenergy.org/wpcms/wp-content/uploads/2020/1...

https://www.nj.gov/dep/njgs/enviroed/infocirc/StorCavsIC.pdf (Control-F "Repauno Works")

TLDR It is a superior long duration liquid energy storage system vs hydrogen.

Conceded! Except for round trip efficiency.

No worries, we are all learning together.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acssuschemeng.7b02219

Wind and solar are terrible solutions. Another 10-20 years and people will be complaining about cost of power as all the wind and solar need to be replaced and repaired. And the discussions on irreversible damage it’s done.

Lucky us we are past that already with nuclear, those plants never need replacement, neither heavy subsidies upfront, or also afterwards to dismantle and clean up.. why humans so stupid? Did I forgot that they also never need maintenance, as all the other tech? Except gas and coal plants, which are also maintenance free, and we can even make profit on the resources they consume!

Not sure how this is possible, when it’s already cheaper in many places to build new wind and solar than to burn coal in existing plants. What kind of “irreversible damage” do you have in mind?

Cheaper to build yet the cost of power has gone up significantly.

At that price resistive heating would be cheaper than nat gas.

And the appliances are inexpensive too.

I was thinking district heating systems are probably a bad fit for heat pumps because they use steam. But if electricity prices have a tendency to go negative retrofitting them with resistive heaters could be a win.

Are there a lot of steam district heating systems in the UK?

I was thinking low cost retail electricity would be quickly absorbed by anyone not yet on electric (or district) heating buying cheap electric heaters (and they ARE cheap).

I think in Nordic Countries and places like Germany and Russia.

My opinion if you get regular periods where electricity prices drop to zero or negative someones going to move to take advantage of that.

I got it! A huge fan that blows a lot of wind when demand peaks!

Literally importing the wind from one place to another. What a time to be alive!

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