Hacker News Reader

I don't think they were saying solar is useless, but you underestimate how difficult it is to change peak load. Well a good start is actually smart systems within homes, for instance to avoid heating said home when nobody is present, or timing loads like car charging and dishwashers to be on that beat. That's great, but it's been proven these smart systems are very hard to roll out, no matter how much you try to say it's cheaper in the end. Well you can ignore all this and roll out significant pricing changes to coincide with peek production anyway, and quickly be met with two problems. The first are the people who say "fossils were better my energy was cheaper", good luck there. And you will also hear a large number of people say "well this is just a further tax against the poor who can't afford these systems, nice work, joe.", and honestly, they'd be right. A big thing we need if we want this energy transition to go well is a more local view, but also we could have solutions that don't depend on daylight to ease that transition.

Anyway, don't know where I was going with this but those are my two cents.

now I am wondering about the net social benefit of solar power disincentivizing third-shift (overnight) production. cheaper electricity during the day makes it relatively more expensive to operate heavy industry plants 24/7.

the heavy investment that goes into those plants incentives operators to drive (and staff) them 24/7, but there are hidden social costs (negative externalities) of having so many people out of diurnal rhythm. maybe massive solar power buildout, with sharply cheaper daytime electricity, would relieve people from working “graveyard shifts” – and maybe that’d be a good thing

I worked a graveyard shift at a factory in college one summer because it was the only job that I could really find after weeks of looking. I definitely feel for the people who did it for a living.

That said, the companies aren't going to just stop, they'll just charge higher prices. To stop producing in the third shift, they'll need to:

    - add more daytime production lines, which means buying more floor space, possibly in a different location with new logistics to work out

    - new capex for the new lines

    - higher overhead because your newly expanded production lines are idle 30% of the time

    - higher overhead from daily startup and shutdown times

This is all for companies where it is feasible to do so. Some plants measure startup and shutdown in hours, if not days. Doing a full cycle every day would mean redesigning their entire operation, if it is even possible to do so at all.

Even places like hospitals don't exactly get to choose to just turn off all the life support and lights at night.

24/7 might make transportation infrastructure utilization more efficient. Less congestion during rush hour for example.

>That's great, but it's been proven these smart systems are very hard to roll out, no matter how much you try to say it's cheaper

I thought the opposite was proven. E.g. When Germany produced a lot of variable output electricity they varied aluminum smelting rates accordingly. That was highly effective and not generally expected.

There's tons of low hanging fruit like that but if you listen to carbon or nuclear lobby propaganda theyre insistent that the only thing that can solve the problem is more lithium than exists in the entire world.

I'm talking specifically on an individual level. I'm not as versed in the industrial side of things as I should be, and sure, if we as a nation (I live in the US) came together and said "let's fix the overconsumption issues" we could do it practically overnight, but the reality is that to fix every home requires an absurd upfront investment very little people are willing to fund. Systematic change is hard. We're working on it, but it's hard.

We actually need constant energy supply at all hours of the day and night if we want to have a modern industrialized economy with factories and refineries operating around the clock. It's generally not practical to shut down those facilities just because electricity prices are temporarily high. So, in practice all of those industries will migrate to areas with cheap, reliable power (even if it's not "green"). This has obvious national security concerns in that it makes us dependent on unreliable imports for critical materials.

> We actually need constant energy supply at all hours of the day and night if we want to have a modern industrialized economy with factories and refineries operating around the clock.

We always need electricity available, but the demand is not constant and there are quite a few discretionary loads which can be run preferentially in the day time. We can expand our electrical capacity with clean solar energy in the day time, reducing the total need for existing polluting sources. Even if industrial factories run off of natural gas at night, a large installed base of solar will allow discretionary loads (home appliances, EV charging, etc) to run off of zero emissions solar when available. And even the industrial plants can utilize solar during the daytime, cutting their CO2 emissions related to energy use in half.

Still burning O&G - the goal is to not which means you need that base load which means nuclear where hydro/pumped storage is not an option.

Only in the short term. It’s taking 10-15+ years to get nuclear online. Looking at the ramping up of battery production by you can build solar today, add batteries in 10 years and be much better off financially and environmentally.

Even China regularly spends 7+ years to build nuclear from the point where construction actually starts and even longer when you include planning.

Hand waving the cost there both financially and environmentally as well a “well we assume things will work out” - there will need to be battery storage in the 100s of gigawatt hours and it needs to be cheap reliable and durable

What if they don’t? There’s no assurances there will be magic battery tech

There is a reason China India Russia and others are still building nuclear plants

We don’t need magic battery tech. Current PV + Batteries can already 24/7 power cheaper than nuclear. It’s only vs fossil fuels where batteries have trouble.

China is building nuclear because they are building everything, but they are effectively building 3x as much solar and 7x as much wind because nuclear just costs more than any other option.

From 2020-2022 China increased generation power by:

   51,600 GWh/year Nuclear
  156,600 GWh/year Solar 
  357,500 GWh/year Wind

Currently they get as much power from solar as nuclear and twice as much from wind. In total they are 34% renewable vs 5% from nuclear. It’s the US that’s heavily invested in Nuclear not China.

umm that doesn't explain why they are building nuclear - could it be because they realize they need the ability to produce power at night and when the wind isn't blowing?

They are literally adding 18+X as much fossil fuel as nuclear over that time frame. That’s what’s proving nighttime power.

Adding more capacity is an all hands on deck situation for the China they are throwing everything at it. Nuclear is simply achieving the smallest gains because the ROI is low.

Base load is a term from the fossil/nuclear time. It is a pure statistical amount which designated how much "slow" sources (coal, nuclear) could be used because there is never less demand than the base load. And everything was done to push the base load up. But it never meant that it was sufficient to deliver the "base load". The power generation still hat to match any demand at any time. So everything else was done with "fast" and often more expensive plants like gas, water.

In the age of renewables, things have changed. If you have enough renewables to cover large parts of the electricity demand on average, then you will frequently produce 100% more of the maximum grid demand. In this situation, "base load" power plants don't make any sense at all. The new term is "residual load". This refers to the load at a point of time which cannot be delivered by renewables at that time. This can also vary between 0 and 100%. Which obviously requires different power plants, like gas, water.

> This refers to the load at a point of time which cannot be delivered by renewables at that time. This can also vary between 0 and 100%.

If you had a predominantly renewable grid, this would generally be 80-100%, because low generation could coincide with peak load. Which is extremely bad, because then you have to duplicate that proportion of generation capacity via some alternative even though it's only rarely needed. Or worse, it's needed a lot but it's fossil fuels.

Meanwhile you want some degree of energy storage, because if you have times when renewable generation is more than 100% of the load, you want to be able to use that power later and not just throw it away.

But then you're back to base load sources making sense. They reduce the amount of storage or peaker plants you need at night and the amount of renewable generation you need during the day.

They just don't make sense as more of the grid than there is "base load" for the same reason as always. Otherwise you'd have times where there is surplus "base load" generation and have to put that into energy storage, when it'd have been cheaper for that part of generation capacity to be renewables.

Call it what you want you still need an always available always there source of power to ensure demand is met. In the PNW hydro fills this role, elsewhere you will need something else and only nuclear really can fulfil that need

You haven't gotten the point: nuclear is very bad for varying loads and that is why it is bad to fill the gaps in renewable production.

>> It's generally not practical to shut down those facilities just because electricity prices are temporarily high.

On the surface, that sounds logic. In reality so, that is exactly what happens: as short notice reaction by big consumers (reducing or increasing consumption as needed), planning in accordance with electricity exchanges... And that behaviour is actually pretty profitable, it contributes to grid stability, enables more flexibility on the consumption side and is technically possible in a surprising number of high consumption industries (paper, chemicals, graphite, steel...).

Yes, certainly I agree. Solar is the best option, for the first 60-70% penetration. I am, like most in this thread, very optimistic about solar. We are nowhere near that level of penetration in most regions. But after that 60-70%, adding more capacity just doesn't move the needle. Once you hit 100% for the day in solar, a spare panel doesn't help your nighttime situation.

So then what. You could overbuild solar, build distribution, build battery banks. I'm not wild about that. Mining for batteries is nasty business and we need all of the Lion we can get for electric mobility. Distribution? It's alright, but you run into problems -- like, what do you do when the sun goes down on the west coast? What do you do when a line goes down? Your system is larger, more centralized, more vulnerable.

Nuclear under the current regulatory regime is clearly a nonstarter. But the capex of nuclear is almost entirely artificial. Something much closer to "too cheap to meter" could be a reality. All it takes is a cultural willingness.

By the way, nuclear having an extraordinary capex makes it even tougher to compete with solar in the mix. Because your capacity factor goes way down if you are only generating at night. This is why we build oil and gas plants -- they're cheap. What we need is for nuclear to favorably compete with oil and gas. It does not need to compete with solar.

I have so many products now that are either built from the start or have gotten a software update to do the bulk of their routine power draw overnight. I scarcely need to use AC at all where I live and my heat is from gas. I expect peak usage hours have already shifted from daytime to nighttime in my own case, probably for at least a few others in the area as well.

Which is dependent on cheaper nighttime rates, if daytime rates where lower than all that demand would happen in the day.