Comment by belorn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by belorn | Hacker News Reader

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Pumped hydro used to exist here in Sweden during the 1970s. They were phased out because they are not cost competitive. They built nuclear power plants instead because those were cost competitive at that time.

It would be funny if the cost has switched between pumped hydro and nuclear, but I suspect they haven't. What really pushed out both were cheap natural gas and oil. Even now, new gas powered plants are being planned to be built within the next 5 years. I don't see a solutions to this without new regulation putting a clamp on the fossil fuels.

The one hope I have for pumped hydro is that our current hydropower fleet are outdated and far outside of minimum environmental standards. Combined they have managed to drive species to the brink of extinction, basically being large meat grinders for migrating fish. The solution of catching the offspring and fly them to Sweden to be implanted back into lakes is a terrible solution that have little to no scientific support. With the required investments into modernization, reverse hydro might not be too expensive to include, assuming again that the economics of the concept start to make sense.

grid-scale storage becomes more profitable when your primary energy production is more intermittent. current pv is something like 10× cheaper than nuclear before you factor in intermittency, and that opens up a huge market for grid-scale storage that didn't exist in the 01970s. pumped hydro was replaced by dispatchable gas, but gas is more expensive now, and batteries are cheaper

If, as seems likely, solar and wind come to totally dominate all new energy construction, then it seems like state/provincial and federal governments will need to either legally mandate / highly incentivize the construction of new baseload by utilities, or build those plants themselves. We have the TVA but as much as I hope, I don't think we're getting a bunch more federally owned and operated power companies in the US.

the us may not be very relevant here

what are you going to construct the new baseload from? nothing comes close to the cheapness of pv and wind. grid-scale energy storage, in the form of batteries, is already too cheap for coal and nuclear to compete with it on that basis, and it's just going to get cheaper as we climb down the learning curve

> current pv is something like 10× cheaper than nuclear

Maybe in nameplate numbers but not actual production in places like Sweden. Especially during the time the consumption is the highest (winter). The whole country is further north then the northern most point in US (excluding Alaska).

But in the places most of humanity lives (including pretty much all of US) solar works quite well just not once you go far enough north/south.

If you want to go renewables in a place like Sweden you go wind+hydro. Hydro is mostly built out already so that leaves wind.

agreed, in places like sweden pv is pretty limited. even the netherlands, the uk, and germany have remarkably little sun; pv capacity factors in all three countries are around 10%

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