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Comment by pydry | Hacker News Reader

There are other cheaper, more effective ways to mitigate solar and wind variability. The most promising being pumped storage - it's cheap and it can store gargantuan amounts of power.

The geography to support it is, according to the scientific literature, very common (citation: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/01/05/sustainable-pumped-hy... ). We'd need about ~7 hours of storage to get a 95-97% carbon free grid, according to current models (citation : https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g... ). Australia could reach roughly that level by building a 2nd snowy 2.

It doesnt indirectly support the nuclear-military industrial complex though, so the government will never be as keen on using taxpayer cash to subsidize it.

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My understanding, and I've read a fair amount on the subject, is that geography for pumped storage is actually pretty limited compared to the eventual need. Do you have a source for it being plentiful?

Promising alternatives to mitigate solar and wind variability, aside from pumped storage and nuclear, include advanced geothermal, load management, thermal storage, long-distance transmission, storing clean hydrogen or clean methane (made from electrolysis and captured CO2), and possibly long-term battery technologies (not lithium, that'll mostly be for overnight or shorter). In no particular order.

The source is a paper from the Australian National University who identified 616,818 suitable locations for 23.1 million GWh of pumped-hydro storage capacity. Link added above.

I've seen quite a lot of contradictory messaging about the availability of locations but it never seems to come linked to any evidence I've seen. It wouldn't be the first time the carbon/nuclear industry successfully spread FUD about science that threatened their bottom line.

For a long time the carbon industry's position was that the only thing capable of accommodating renewable intermittency was ~3 weeks' worth of lithium ion batteries. This is obviously nonsense, but I still see it repeated a lot.

Clean hydrogen / methane would suffice as storage if the goal was to supply green electricity cheaper than nuclear power (not because it's cheap, but because nuclear power is that expensive), but we should be able do better than that - they're both quite inefficient.

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