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Comment by bouke | Hacker News Reader

Same over here in The Netherlands. We have subsidised solar panels and now have an abundance of solar energy, but only during sunny days. The remainder of the time we still have to burn gas and coal. There is some nuclear, which we’ll need much more of if we want to stop with fossil fuels. Meanwhile policy is still heavily pushing for electrification while the power grid is overloaded and will take years and billions to address.

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Yep, apparently The Netherlands have the most negative hours:

https://x.com/BM_Visser/status/1793536590821617769

160h with negative energy this year only (last year 71h on this date), Germany and Spain have around 140. Those water electrolyzers can't come soon enough

It can even happen on cloudy windy weekend days because of the massive wind farms

Wait, you guys basically have similar problems? I thought it was only our politicians who were incompetent. Well...I'm sure they are more incompetent than yours for sure, but at least we're in the same boat there!

Why incompetent?

Having a lot of solar is good.

We can export it to neighbors and it motivates other actors in the market to invest in getting this cheap sun energy which creates more pressure on dirty energy.

That we don't life in a planed market is obvious otherwise all those things would not be necessary but we don't life in a perfect market

Exactly. I imagine that green energy production (hydrogen, ammonia) can be made flexible so that it consumes the cheap/free energy, whether from solar or wind, and greatly stabilises the prices. But to get there we first have to have that cheap energy available, nobody will build the plants with just some vague promises.

So what will happen when you get rid of "dirty sources"? It all looks good on a paper, but when your clean solar energy is not available, like during winter time, and you got rid of your dirty sources, what are you going to do?

How is energy company going to pay for grid maintenance, wages and general passives, when energy price is negative? This all looks like 1 step before bankruptcy of energy companies.

You just turn them on.

Keeping a coal or gas plant on standby is not that expensive and you still saved a ton of fuel.

That's a disadvantage ⇒ they're incompetent?

I thought about it, and to me it seems that ① having everything ready at the same time was not possible and ② PV ready first is the smallest problem.

Consider some of the alternatives. What would you think of your politicians if they built a bunch of batteries that lost money for years because of a lack of zero-cost midday PV? Or if they built lots of nuclear power that then turned out to be so expensive that big power users found it better to install their own PV and reschedule their power use around PV availability?

I might have looked at what they wrote through the "Germany"-lenses.

While increasing solar is certainly a success, falling short in wind, hastily getting out of nuclear years ago, heavily using coal, failing to even install a high capacity power line from the north to south to bring wind energy to where it's needed...Nimby-ism everywhere. Local state politicians that do nothing but populism aka Nimby-ism on a state level. Explosion of bureaucracy. You mention "getting everything ready". This just implies seeing the big picture and having a plan. Knowing our political system I have my doubts because it feels like it's too static and, if at all, rather reactive than active.

I'm sorry, sometimes I get taken away by negativity because of all of this and I forget to look at the bright (and sunny) side.

Isn't energy storage possible? Or at least, isn't that a sensible frontier for protecting the solar investment?

Not with any known technology.

The cost of storing electricity in batteries is down to $80/MWH.

This evening batteries in California peaked at 6.3GW. Last year they were peaking at 2.3GW in the evening. I think that means is they installed 15GWH worth of batteries last year. That's close to 0.4KWH per person.

The whole economic landscape of solar and batteries has changed radically in the last 4 years.

Everyone talks about batteries but I'd imagine that hydrogen and ammonia production would be much more lucrative, no? Much cheaper storage and potentially direct usage in industry, or just consuming back to electricity when prices are high.

I've done calcs for using hydrogen from electrolysis for ammonia production.

I think it's 40kwh per kg to make hydrogen. Ammonia is 17.6% hydrogen by weight.

So you need 7kwh/kg to make ammonia. At $40/MWH

Cost is $280/ton.

This source (I can't vouch for) range is $303/ton to $1058

https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insight...

Looking more, appears that ammonia producers are already building out electrolysis plants. You don't hear about this because the companies that do this don't care what the public thinks about anything.

https://ammoniaenergy.org/articles/technology-status-ammonia...

Thanks for providing numbers. There's a lot of hype currently about hydrogen/ammonia production and how cheap renewables can change the energy infrastructure. Will be interesting to see how this will actually turn out.

One thing worth mentioning is companies that make stuff like ammonia and manufacturers in general absolutely hate anything subject to wild price swings. Which natural gas totally does. The other thing is the Russian Ukrainian war exposed manufacturers to supply disruptions of natural gas. And that's generally considered intolerable.

Hence ammonia manufacturers really don't like being dependent on natural gas.

Buying solar to run a electrolysis plant has the benefit that the cost is fixed. Because it's all secured loans with low fixed interest rates. And the supply is guaranteed.

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