Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

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This is factually inaccurate. At solar and storage costs today, they are cheaper than existing fossil generation in all of Europe. In the US, even at today's low fossil gas prices, they are competitive. They will become even more competitive over the next several years as the price of solar and batteries continues to decline, and the US fossil gas market is exposed to global demand via LNG exports. Renewables prices will keep going down, fossil costs will keep going up, very broadly speaking.

Base load is a myth; as long as you can orchestrate low carbon energy (nuclear + renewables + hydro), storage (hydro and batteries), transmission, and load shifting and shedding, the grid will continue to operate at expected service levels. Europe demonstrates this today with high renewables penetration in Portugal, Spain, the UK, and Germany, and nuclear in France (with robust exports to adjacent grids). "Excess" renewables that are curtailed during low demand seasons solve for near term storage as the storage manufacturing/deployment ramp curves upward and the price decline curves downward.

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2025/07/01/solar-cost-of-electri...

https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...

https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/european-unio...

https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-is-eus-bigges...

> Base load is a myth; as long as you can orchestrate low carbon energy (nuclear + renewables + hydro), storage (hydro and batteries), transmission, and load shifting and shedding, the grid will continue to operate at expected service levels. Europe demonstrates this today with high renewables penetration in Portugal, Spain, the UK, and Germany, and nuclear in France (with robust exports to adjacent grids).

As long as you keep the gas peaker plants operating for those few months every couple of years with overcast, low wind weather (e.g. in 2021: https://theconversation.com/what-europes-exceptionally-low-w... ) which severely limits a lot of the renewable output.

Or you don't have an unpredicted peak/drop and the whole grid fails over (cf. Iberia a few months back).

Handwaving very complex problems as "it's a myth" won't make it go away.

> Handwaving very complex problems as "it's a myth" won't make it go away.

Having evidence that the problem is tractable, while observing the continued rate of deployment of generation and storage, as well as their cost decline rates, is arguably not handwaving anything away. Simply follow along observing China as they continue to prove out the thesis ahead of developed countries.

Enough sunlight falls on Earth in ~30 minutes to power humanity for a year. Everything else is capture, transmission, and storage.

China launches world’s first grid-forming sodium-ion battery storage plant - https://www.ess-news.com/2025/06/03/china-launches-worlds-fi... - June 3rd, 2025 ("With a total investment of over CNY 460 million ($63.8 million) and occupying 34,000 square metres, the Baochi plant is designed for an installed capacity of 200MW/400MWh. Based on a dual daily charge-discharge cycle, it can regulate up to 580 GWh annually — enough to power 270,000 households, with 98 per cent of its energy sourced from renewables. The facility supports more than 30 local wind and solar power stations, alleviating the impact of intermittent supply and facilitating the integration of high shares of renewables into the grid.")

How we made it: will China be the first electrostate? - https://www.ft.com/content/e1a232c7-52a0-44dd-a13b-c4af54e74... | https://archive.today/OSFYo - May 20th, 2025

If we use power-to-gas for the gas peaker plants, gas peaker plants can be just as renewable. We can use excess Summer electricity to generate it, We've already got the powerplants and storage anyway.

RE ".....At solar and storage costs today, they are cheaper than existing fossil generation in all of Europe....." If so, are power prices decreasing in Europe?

  If not, there must be other costs not included, in the above statement?

Europe isn't optimizing for lower prices. It's trying to phase out coal, which might lead to higher prices if gas is used more often:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/apr/20/why-the-uks...

Lots of nuance, citations below, TLDR is fossil gas and hydro volatility from Russia and climate change has caused price levels seen. Europe avoided €59B in fossil fuel import costs due to new wind and solar in the EU since 2019. The evidence shows renewables have been restraining electrical cost increases, and as more renewables and storage is deployed, costs should remain flat (if not decline).

https://www.iea.org/reports/renewable-energy-market-update-j...

https://ember-energy.org/data/european-electricity-prices-an...

https://gmk.center/en/infographic/electricity-prices-in-euro...

https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/electricity-prices-acros...

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