Hacker News Reader

Comment by churchill | Hacker News Reader

Nothing annoys me like these foolish headlines. Running out of electricity? Then generate some more! With grid-scale solar and batteries (Chinese production is driving prices down aggressively) you can spin up gigawatt-scale plants almost overnight, until you can cover the shortfall with nuclear or thermal plants.

And, it's not like TSMC is using electricity clandestinely: they're a fantastically profitable business probably buying electricity wholesale. So, stop the stupid handwringing and expand production.

View on HN

"With grid-scale solar and batteries..."

From the article:

> “The problem with solar in Taiwan is that we don’t have a big area. We have the same population as Australia and use the same amount of electricity, but we are only half the size of Tasmania, and 79 percent of Taiwan is mountainous, so land acquisition is difficult.” Rooftop solar is expensive, and roof space is sometimes needed for other things, such as helicopter pads, public utilities, or water tanks.

helicopter pads… are you serious? so the whole freaking country is a helicopter pad? Maybe a warm welcome for the CCP? It’s not that hard putting some solar panels on buildings. Helicopter pads as a general excuse is the dumbest i have ever heard.

>so the whole freaking country is a helicopter pad?

the whole country is people living in 10 story apartment buildings. Taiwan looks like this[1], not like suburban Texas where everyone lives in 2k square feet mansions. The very limited roof space/dweller ratio you have in a country like this is indeed used for water storage, helicopter pads, what have you. If you're in a country so sparsely populated where home's are so large that a house can power itself with solar maybe roof solar makes some difference, in a place where you can slap 2 solar panels on a building of 300 people it really doesn't.

[1]https://img.static-kl.com/images/media/54842792-60B3-4C6E-A9...

The population density of Taiwan is 649 people per square kilometre. In the US it is 38.

So that means in the US you can use renovables and the same space needs to satisfy the demand of 17 times less people than in Taiwan. In other words: it doesn't make any sense in Taiwan.

Also It doesn't make any sense to close your nuclear plants, specially when China could invade you any day of the week and destroy anything you have offshore in hours.

if the US abandons Ukraine support after two years, it would mean that it will abandon Taiwan too. Nuclear deterrent is real.

Unless Taiwan is crammed so full that people can't move, they can easily source 200 KM² to increase their electricity capacity by 10% (i.e., roughly 20TWh). if they realise it's a national security/economic competitiveness issue, they will solve it.

Otherwise, what do you suggest they do? Nothing? Or keep hand-wringing with articles like this?

> they can easily source 200 KM² to increase their electricity capacity by 10%

Solar panels are by definition easy to see and thus knock out remotely.

> what do you suggest they do

Nukes. We’ve seen from Ukraine that they’re given special status even in war.

What's that even supposed to mean? Renewable generation would be much more secure than comparable centralised generation because you'd need so many more resources to knock it out.

If i were an adversary I'd much rather my enemy source everything from a single NPP than hundreds of square km of solar.

> you'd need so many more resources to knock it out

If you're America, yes. If you're an island nation defending against China one hundred and ten miles away, you don't have the air defence resources to protect your entire island. (And they do have the resources to knock hout hundreds of square kilometres of solar.)

Population density is unevenly concentrated.

> Population density is unevenly concentrated

So are PLAN landing sites. (They’re all in the south.)

Yes. That means cities that aren't going to go solar are skewing the statistics, and the real density disparity is more than 17 times.

There's not a whole lot of space in Taiwan for huge solar farms. They were close to having nuclear, but there's strong political pushback. Offshore wind seems to be doing well, at least.

Solar farms don't take a huge amount of space. The roof tops of the chip factories are probably a perfectly fine place to augment the chip factory electric use

Hello "augment" I see you've been doing some heavy lifting lately, looking good.

Solar doesn’t need that much space. Nuclear is about 10x as energy dense in the US, so it’s better but not as much as generally portrayed.

However unlike nuclear you can toss solar just about anywhere there’s a little land or even a lake. Nuclear needs lot contiguous space with access to water for cooling and big reservoirs for safety etc.

A chip fabricator cannot run off intermittent power. It can't shutdown quickly, nor safely.

You can get 99.99+% uptime from a system only fed solar power. It’s the same cost vs reliability tradeoff made everywhere else.

France recently went weeks with every single nuclear power plant in the country offline, but the system was designed to cope with such downtime.

France covered that by importing power from the rest of Europe. Taiwan doesn’t have that option as an island whose closest friendly neighbor is hundreds of kilometers away.

Which suggests ramping up nuclear would be problematic in the long term for them.

At the beginning you can get great uptime but eventually you face years like this: https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/IMG/pdf/wnisr2022-figure2...

That’s probably more of an artefact of France building exact copies of the same design within a relatively short timeframe (ten years) so they all shared the exact same design flaws and started showing their age at the same time

Thus ‘ramping up’ is a problem. If they want to replace 5% of their electric grid per decade with nuclear then it’s not an issue but that’s not going to solve short term issues. Go a lot faster and they trade short term problems for longer term issues.

There are 56 reactors in France, they never went offline at the same time. It happened that half went offline but no more than that

Not in the same instant but they were unavailable in overlapping succession such that the entire fleet was never close to completely online even when the grid was at maximum demand.

Of those 56 reactors in the entire of 2021 no more than 49 where on online at any time in the same day. 90% of the time it was 46 or less. 16% of days it was 36 or less bottoming out at 28, and everything didn’t suddenly start working in 2022.

https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/IMG/pdf/wnisr2022-figure2...

That’s the reality of “dependable” nuclear power, it wants to run 24/7 but can’t run 365.

Ever heard of „battery storage“?

I find people generally underestimate the generation capacity of solar, both per cost and per area.

A rooftop of solar will produce enough energy for multiple households easily. The main constraints is storage.

You mentioned offshore wind, is offshore solar not a thing? Seems it'd be rather easy to float a farm of them...easier than floating a giant windmill, at least.

China would find an excuse to attack anything put in "their" sea.

shouldn't there be more clouds over ocean, as that is where the clouds tend to form?

> Seems it'd be rather easy to float a farm of them

Geopolitical threats aside, I imagine floating a farm would be the least of challenges[1].

[1] https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/80/1/1520-04...

Geo location aside, putting things off shore is really a way to drive up cost such as maintenance like mad and it makes even less sense when you are working with large surfaces rather than something designed around having height and wind tolerance.

100KM² of panels (10GW) will generate 22,000 GWh, or roughly 10% of Taiwan's current electricity demand. That is, a 10KM * 10KM field (not necessarily all in on place) that takes up just 0.3% of the island is all you need.

Last year, TSMC used 25,000GWh, or 12.5% of Taiwan's electricity, so a 10GW solar project like stated above will take care of it.

If you need dollar figures: Chinese PV prices have dropped to 10 cents/watt while LFP cells are down to $53/kwh. So, $1b will get you 10GW worth of panels, while $4.4b will get you 8 hours of storage. So, roughly $10b to completely go off grid.

Would they be able to procure that many panels from China when they know they'll end up in Taiwan though?

Taiwan's money spends just as good as anyone's money. That's why Europe is still burning Russian gas while in a proxy war that's seen hundreds of thousands killed. It's only in Hollywood movies that you refuse perfectly good money for geopolitics.

> It's only in Hollywood movies that you refuse perfectly good money for geopolitics.

So why did Russia stop delivering gas via Nord Stream 1 from 09/2022 on (before the sabotage)?

Because they weren't getting paid in "perfectly good money" (they were getting paid into frozen EU bank accounts).

Am I wrong to say that north stream 1 & 2 were put out of commission and Europe procures it’s gaz now via LNG that flows via the huge terminals that were built after 2022?

The Russians are managing to bypass restrictions to some degree using their “dark fleet” but that’s oil, and hardly a case of Europe continuing as if nothing were.

There are other routes.

One of them, still active until this December when the contract ends, is through Ukraine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022%E2%80%932023_Russia%E2%80...

No, but we still buy Russian LNG

After two comments saying I was wrong, I decided to google “does Europe import LNG from Russia”

First result is a detailed page from the European Union, showing amongst others a diagram that EU imports from Russia were divided by three.

https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/infographics/eu-gas-suppl...

Of course the EU could lie, but that seems unlikely. It could also be that Russia is selling to the EU without the EU knowing it. For oil that is almost certainly the case to some extent. For LNG you need very specific infrastructure (boats, terminals) that are not compatible with the famous “dark fleet”.

Russia is probably selling the gaz to someone else, or at least trying to. But in that case at a discounted price and with less margin because pipelines cannot be improvised, so they have to use more expensive means of transport.

Mind you those figures were 2023 and they will have reduced even more most likely. But Europe is still buying gaz to some extent.

China seems happy to export solar panels to anyone.. Taiwan would probably not like to be a big importer of something it can't procure from other trade partners at similar prices though. I think Taiwan wants tariff wars with China to reduce economic ties.

China and Tawain do trade despite the situation

Something must be wrong in your estimates, the biggest solar farm is ~60sqkm and only 2.2gw, it's in India and definitely get much more sun than taiwan

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhadla_Solar_Park

https://globalsolaratlas.info/map

Edit: nvm it's not the biggest anymore, but still you need at least 2x to 3x the area to get to 10gw and that's with much better settings that's what Taiwan offers

The area needed depends somewhat on where the panels are located, the north/east don't see a ton of sun for about half the year. Also, 70+% of TW is covered by mountains and dense forest. I don't mean to say it's impossible (I'd like to see a lot more solar), just that the economics aren't as good as other places.

I also wonder if building for typhoon conditions affects construction costs significantly.

$10b seems impossibly low to go fully off-grid, I expect real estate costs would dwarf panel/battery/construction costs. TSMC isn't stupid, so I assume they've explored the options in this area.

I love that Taiwan has 20 peaks over 3km. Such a small island for that kind of geography!

Gaz would be perfect if there wasn't a risk of Chinese blockade. Renewable would be great if there was land and no typhoon. Nuclear would be great if quakes were not a thing. The problem isn't to price electricity. It is to find a viable long term strategy for an open society having to mitigate multiple risks.

All these issues you just raised are not unique to Taiwan - everyone in the region has them yet they're expanding energy production. I mean China, specifically. If you want a zero-risk energy source, you can live in the dark, stumbling around with candles. And it's more environmentally friendly :)

You might want to check a map if you don't see the difference between China and Taiwan. It's an island, it's small as fuck and half of it is a mountain range

> With grid-scale solar and batteries (Chinese production is driving prices down aggressively) you can spin up gigawatt-scale plants almost overnight, until you can cover the shortfall with nuclear or thermal plants.

Can you show an existence proof of someone spinning up gigawatts of energy overnight?

And solar doesn't help with night time and batteries haven't hit giagawatt scale yet, you might be a bit over your skiis with your claim here.

Well technically, every time the sun comes up those panels start producing all over the world. FYI, it happens because the earth is spinning.

„China is installing the wind and solar equivalent of five large nuclear power stations per week„

https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2024-07-16/chinas-renewa...

The report is here: https://climateenergyfinance.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com