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Comment by bloopernova | Hacker News Reader

Plus if it's not sunny/windy in one part of the country, it may well be very sunny or windy in other parts of the country. We have a whole freaking energy grid!

This isn't aimed at you, but more at the people dismissing the utility of solar and wind power.

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> We have a whole freaking energy grid!

You actually don't. Not one fit for that purpose, at least without significant investment, permitting hurdles, delays etc etc.

If you think you don’t have that grid, your country has to build it (instead of billions and more than 10 years for nuclear). Like the Synchronous grid of Continental Europe [1] and [2] which I far from finished but a good start.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continenta...

2: https://www.entsoe.eu/data/map/

Yeah, the grid is the part of this that doesn't get discussed enough.

Can't we do both?

This is what happened to Germany. They tried going 100% renewables and then had Russia take up the slack for the rest of what they needed. Then they realized they had a massive shortfall and then was leaning far too much on Russia to take up the slack.

As someone else pointed out, geopolitics always weighs heavy in energy production. Just like in Germany's case where they relied too heavy on Russia for the shortfall of renewables, then Russia invaded Ukraine and Russia used their energy production as leverage to essentially blackmail Germany into not going along with UN sanctions against them.

However we need to get to total energy independence, I'm all for, and this whole idea it has to be one or the other only lengthens the process of getting there. In the mean time, it puts us in a precarious position to be involved with countries and regime's that don't like us and will never have our best interests in mind.

I assume you mean sanctions in general, not UN sanctions specifically. Russia as a permanent member of the UN security council can veto any resolution, so there is little point in even trying to push something through UN.

Germany did not make a real effort at truly going 100% renewable. There are other European countries doing it for real and having wild success.

No real effort? >50% of Germany's power came from renewables in 2023. That sounds like a massive effort to me.

There was definitely a period where the "renewables are too expensive" propaganda was winning and right wing German parties were successful in slowing renewables, particularly offshore wind rollout in Germany.

This will have cost them Billions, similar to the British right wing effectively banning onshore wind in Emgland at roughly the same time.

Both nations have done well with renewables, but could have done better and saved money and supported local business at the same time.

The cost of the renewables rollout in Germany is on the order of 2 trillion euros. They produce so much renewable energy that the prices regularly go negative, but then import at much higher prices when they don’t. They pay among the highest prices in Europe, and still their CO2 emissions are among the worst. If wind/solar as a whole were both as cheap as touted and as environmentally friendly, that should not be the case.

The whole world owes Germany a massive debt for their overpayment for renewables. Investing in renewables on a massive scale in the 90's is what really kicked off the virtuous cycle that led to the low costs of renewables today.

Germany would have been much better off building nuclear in the 90's. But because they invested in renewables instead, everybody (including Germany) has a much better option of building renewables in the 2020s.

Renewables are too expensive.

Especially once you take systems costs into account, which you must, but renewable fanbois never do.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03605...

Your source suggests that providing 95% of Texas energy with wind and solar and batteries will cost the same as providing it with nuclear and batteries.

I'm dubious about many of their assumptions but even your source shows that renewables are the obvious choice to power the world.

It's also interesting that the cost drops 50% if you don't need to cover the last 5%. A shame he didn't go further and calculate at 80% and so on like the recent Australian working paper.

I guess that would show that starting the rollout now would provide lots of savings that could be used to deploy the later percentiles.

If you use old numbers for something that drops 80% in cost in a decade, you get bad numbers.

The most successful ones have a combination of favorable geographic/geological conditions (geothermal vents, suitable rivers, good offshore to land ratio) and small size. It would be hard for Germany to copy solutions from let's say Iceland or Norway.

Geopolitics is largely determined by who controls energy resources. We've seen, over and over, how borders between energy producers and consumers are inevitably messy. Nuclear can be built most places. Sun and wind cannot.

Geopolitics and nuclear power are not always such a great combination - consider the Russian occupation of the nuclear power plant in Ukraine. I'm not against nuclear power in general, but saying it's a great hedge against political risks involved with wind and solar is quite a stretch.

That required a war. Turning off gas to Eastern Europe does not.

> Nuclear can be built most places.

Nukes require lots of cooling, needing access to large amounts of water from water bodies, that's definitely not "most places" by definition.

> Nukes require lots of cooling

Two units cooling for every unit of electricity, at least with PWR/BWR. At a 10 degree C rise it requires about 50ml of water (per second) per kW of electrical power.

Palo Verde NPP in Arizona happens to be in a rather dry area. It uses treated sewage for cooling and is trying to use rather poor quality groundwater too.

https://cronkitenews.azpbs.org/2020/02/25/palo-verde-nuclear...

Nuclear power plants have been and are bing built in deserts, so no, this is not a hard requirement, just a "nice to have".

That’s most places humans live isn’t it?

If you ever done a tour on a nuclear facility you'd hear about how careful they need to be managing water temperatures in their discharge pools, you don't want a nuke frying off all wildlife on the rivers and/or lakes nearby. You don't want to create massive ponds of still water for cooling, and you definitely don't want to have a nuke potentially discharging contaminated water near population centres (in case something goes wrong and the discharge needs to happen).

This limits a lot nuclear facilities placement.

Nuclear power plants only really have an effect on the water temperature if they do not have a cooling tower. This makes the plant considerably cheaper, but, as you mentioned, damages the ecosystem.

Only in rare cases, such as during revisions or emergencies, they might be unable to cool the condenser using the tower-coolant-loop. Then they might have to warm up the water temporarily.

> you definitely don't want to have a nuke potentially discharging contaminated water near population centres (in case something goes wrong and the discharge needs to happen).

There is no such failure case that a "discharge needs to happen" for the irradiated water. There is a comparatively tiny amount of deionized and supercleaned water in the reactor that is always cycled around. Even if such a case were to occur (how??), the amount of water would be easy to handle/store.

I live a few miles from a nuclear plant. I am far more concerned about the coal plants that are also nearby.

> you definitely don't want to have a nuke potentially discharging contaminated water near population centres

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly...

And Brits are not exactly leaping into action about raw sewage discharges into rivers.

I mean, classical plants and those based around the regulations that the US currently has on the books thanks to some questionable lobbying in the 60s require large amounts of water, sure.

These are hardly the only viable plant designs that exist. Molten Salt, Pebble Bed, and other designs exist.

China is currently underway building a molten salt cooled Thorium reactor.

Russia has had sodium-cooled reactors [0] for some time. America experimented with them at least back to the 1950s, with the USS Seawolf (SSN 575, not SSN 21) having a sodium-cooled reactor (S2G) for her first few years.

Russia also had lead-bismuth reactors, at least militarily, with the Alfa-class.

[0]: https://www.neimagazine.com/news/mox-use-at-russias-bn-800-r...

Dry cooling towers do exist (though I am aware they also have disadvantages).

Bullshit. Sun and wind can be built everywhere. They're just more effective some places than others. But they are cheaper than nuclear everywhere.

Let's stay realistic. You can build as many solar panels as you want in Iceland and you won't get any power from them mid winter. They're not just less effective, they would not be functional for over a month. That's not "everywhere".

There's a reason i said "sun and wind."

That doesn't work very well for the Western North America. After sunset there is nowhere to obtain much solar or wind power. We're not going to build a transmission cable to Hawaii.

the wind doesn't stop blowing after sunset, and grid-scale batteries are a thing

The wind slows down a lot after sunset in most of North America. Grid scale batteries aren't really a thing yet. Someday maybe, but it's going to take many years to provision enough to handle the nighttime base load on the west coast.

You've got that backwards. The wind is stronger at night in most of North America.

https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-69f8723dccb62f0572daf...

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