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Comment by gwright | Hacker News Reader

I'm not saying it can't be done. I'm saying it hasn't been done yet. How about we try it before pretending that we can shift to 100% renewables or before legislating transitions that we don't know how to accomplish.

Hawaii is trying hard, but it doesn't seem to be going well with the grid becoming less reliable. BTW, this video is a solid overview of the power situation in Hawaii: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbECmVdyWlQ&themeRefresh=1

I believe parts of the Azores have tried, but have not been successful.

I would be very interested in pointers to successful projects in this area.

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I don't like how we talk about 100% renewables as if failing that means failure.

I'm happy with 90% renewables, a much easier goal, while we figure out the diminishing marginal returns later as technology breakthroughs and cost curves do the work for us.

Our objective is to minimize the area under the curve of future emissions. It's not "net-zero" in the abstract. Net-zero is just a proxy for the true objective. Getting to 90% renewables soon means less emissions (while being cheaper) than waiting an extra 10-15 years for 100% nuclear.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by 90%. 90% of what?

You can't just have 90% of power generated by renewables and 10% by fossil fuels because there are times when you get 0% from renewables and so your fossil fuel plants need to provide 100% of the power. So you spent all that money on renewable infrastructure and didn't even get the benefit of shuttering your fossil fuel plants.

90% of power generation on average.

What you've written here isn't persuasive. Are you trying to say that keeping gas peaker plants as a backup will mean renewables are more expensive than nuclear? Where is your analysis that fleshes that out?

Especially when a simply cycle turbine plant has a capital cost per kW maybe 5% that of a nuclear plant.

> I'm not saying it can't be done. I'm saying it hasn't been done yet.

So, what point are you making then? That because it hasn't been done it shouldn't be done?

In any case, there's a perfectly fine explanation about why it hasn't been done: people largely can burn cheap fossil fuels and not have to pay for the negative externalities that imposes on the world.

You are trying hard to misunderstand me. Don't communicate as if it is a solved problem if your solution has yet to be actually been built and successfully demonstrates the feasibility of the solution.

I'm not sure how to interpret your last sentence. A demonstration project, especially subsidized by the government, doesn't need to adhere to any sort of market pressure regarding the price of fossil fuels.

It's a solved problem in the sense that it involves components that are all understood to work, integrated. This is the surest kind of innovation.

Now, we don't know how cheap it will ultimately be once these things are integrated and run down their experience curves. But pretending there's any serious doubt that they would work is more dishonest than arguing they would.

Your definition of "solved" is quite a bit different than my definition of "solved". Especially if you are going to just pretend that the economics aren't to be included in the solution.

Yes, your definition of "solved" is useful for nothing but obfuscation and denial. Mine is useful for planning what to do.

Come on.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's harder to do it on islands with only a single weather system than on continents which have diverse weather systems.

You need a significantly higher capacity (read: expensive) grid to get continent-scale weather diversity.

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