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Comment by Guid_NewGuid | Hacker News Reader

A funny thing that I notice on this site, as a foreign, is apparently everywhere in the US that isn't the place in whichever article is under discussion has weather such as to be effectively uninhabitable.

I realise there is extreme weather in the US but every discussion on renewables, cars, trains, cycling, construction standards or whatever else has comments along the lines of "good for Utah (or wherever) but this couldn't possibly work in the 95% of the US that is constantly inundated by biblical plagues".

Sure the performance of whatever technology might be suboptimal but I struggle to believe vast swathes of the US experience weather so extreme as to be uninhabitable. If I'm wrong y'all really need to leave that country for your own safety.

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There is a mental block around "efficiency". Because what most people have in mind is some sort of technical performance efficiency of the solar + battery system. And if it's not higher than some number - then it's unworkable in region X.

Technical performance is an input in the efficiency that actually matters, but definitely not the sole determinant. Ultimately the cost efficiency that delivers the needed power at the some time. If you can capitalize more panels at the right cost, it overcomes an "uunworkable" technical performance efficiency.

Five years ago, solar + batts were getting dismissed as being able to offset natural gas. Now its offseting that tradoff in new energy builds for California. What we're seeing is renewables advancing on multiple efficiency fronts - both technical performance efficiencies, and subsystem costs, to deliver more competitive system cost efficiency. More and more traditional energy and more regions will be displaced because these technologies are still in the rapid cost drop phase of their manufacturing S curves.

It's really a matter of who has the focus and financial strength to continue to invest in the manufacturing and tech to keep up the improvements - a lot like the solar+batt version of Moores law in chips and the race surrounding it.

It's not just "uninhabitable weather". I live in Michigan. It's the second-cloudiest state in the nation, just barely behind Oregon (but they get way more rain than we do), but in terms of "plague"-type weather it's not bad. We do get some thunderstorms, and nominally, we're the northeastern end of "Tornado Alley", and we do have the occasional tornado, but it's not that common. On the net I think Michigan is rather less prone to natural disasters than most places.

But it's cloudy. A lot. It literally does not raise to my conscious awareness if the sun does not shine in December. And I mean literally in its original sense. It takes over 30 days in the winter for me to notice that I haven't seen the sun in a while and another couple of weeks before I'm really bothered by it. We're already far enough north that winter days are noticeably shorter and less bright as it is, and then the sun doesn't even shine. In the summer 50% cloudy is a fairly normal day. Bright blue sky from horizon to horizon is uncommon enough to be worth noting.

Solar advocates may relax as I'm not going to claim that solar is "useless" in Michigan. However, it is undeniably a lot more useful in deserts that are much closer to the equator. And big government solar projects really do pencil out much worse in Michigan than they do in California or Arizona, even though I'm not constantly dodging death around here. I like the diversity in power sources on general principles but we do take an efficiency hit to get it.

I'm originally from the UK so I know cloudy. Not sure if we're better or worse than Michigan but the weather is one of the main reasons I left.

For sure solar isn't as effective in the UK but we're lucky to have shallow sea nearby for offshore wind (onshore wind being opposed by the same kind of NIMBY clowns that are a true biblical plague in every country). But if solar is cheap enough you may as well deploy it even where it's not especially efficient. Then you can start to look at things like transmission lines or whatever energy source works best for your area.

Edit: it's a reasonable point that dollars spent in the 2nd cloudiest state on solar aren't particularly well spent, but that leaves you with 48(?) less cloudy states. While CA is pretty south there are 10 more states to the south of it, one of them is even called the sunshine state and is effectively an uninhabitable sinking swamp, ideal for solar!

There's a good article here showing how solar, gas, and battery storage work together in the UK:

https://electrotechrevolution.substack.com/p/renewables-allo...

The whole thing is worth reading, but this is the most interesting result:

Let's push the boundaries further and see how much solar we can get in the system without exceeding the 100% gas case’s £76/MWh. Playing with the numbers we find that installing 6.5 GW of solar and 12 GWh of battery storage alongside our 1 GW gas plant, we can get to the result plotted below...

Solar now accounts for over 70% of total generation. During the summer basically all electricity now comes from solar. This system costs the same £76/MWh as the 100% gas case. Remarkably, a combination of 1 GW of gas, 6.5 GW of solar, and 12 GWh of battery storage can achieve the same overall system cost as installing just 1 GW of gas.

The lowest-cost scenario has much less solar, but not 100% gas either:

Solar energy now accounts for over a quarter of total generation, while the total system costs £9/MWh less than just using gas.

You can modestly decarbonize a gas-driven electricity system with solar and save a modest amount of money, or keep costs constant and deeply (though not completely) decarbonize the same system with solar and batteries, even in the relatively sunlight-poor UK.

How is the wind in Michigan?

Mixed. There are some substantial wind farms in the middle of the state and on the lakes, especially on the northern part of the thumb. I'm not sure how they compare in general but they're pretty big when you're driving through them. Here's some info on that: https://thumbwind.com/michigan-wind-farm-map/#h-the-great-la...

And since their google maps embed seems to be broken, a direct link to that: https://www.google.com/maps/d/embed?mid=11HL-d8V1MCxM01uEwpn...

Where I live isn't that great though.

Yeah, there’s a lot of exaggeration, but the kernel of truth is that margins in energy generation are thin and it only takes a small shift away from ideal conditions to make gas the cheaper option. Renewables+storage has to work in the bad times as well as the good.

Read the transcript. "...the sunny places, think about Muscat in Oman, or Las Vegas in the US or Johannesburg in South Africa. So places like that get more than 90% of the way to 1 GW constant electricity with those cloudy days. In a place like Washington or Madrid, you're in the high 80s. So 88% in Madrid, if I remember correctly. And then for Washington, it would be somewhere there as well.

And then if you have the bad luck to be stuck in Birmingham, in the UK.

That's a cloudy place. And you barely have, like, two very, very sunny months, like in the middle of the year in summer when it's actually, it is actually sunny. Most of the time it's various degrees of cloudy. So even there you have more than 60% of the way to 24/365"

So it's not as big as a drop-off as you might think with solar+battery. And that's not accounting for wind being a much better performer in the UK.

That's fair and it was less a dig at the specific comment than the overall trend of American fatalism that can be summed up as "a new thing can't possibly work because we live in a weather torment nexus".

While the point that the benchmark favours CA is reasonable what about the other 10+ states on California's latitude? Even as far North as New York is equivalent latitude to Madrid. I just struggle to believe the desert of Nevada for instance or Texas isn't also viable for solar. Plus those states have the advantage of not having California's crumbling transmission infrastructure (though even worse for Texas from what I understand) or anti-building regulatory regime.

This strand of American pessimism seems to only ever lean one way, to ignore lessons from other countries and to oppose new tech.

What would be favourable for that cost curve is not putting tarrifs on Chinese subsidised panels and this fatalism leeches energy from that consensus. When the tech is cheap enough to slap anywhere the optimal deployment is less important and why not make the most of China's 'blunder' with these below cost panels.

(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44637724.)

No one said uninhabitable except you.

OP said that in terms of weather, California is almost ideal for renewables and self-driving cars. California is very, very, very sunny and mild.

Many places in the United States are not that for a good portion of the year. That was the point. Not that it's uninhabitable, but that these results may not translate to other areas.

You're correct that uninhabitable was my exaggeration and the OP's reasonable point was that some parts of the US would see less impressive outcomes.

But from a brief Google California isn't even in the 10 most southerly states in the US. While I have broader problems with the political direction of travel of this site in general my main concern is trying to shake Americans out of this fatalism where nothing ever works, nothing is possible and the country has to be left to decay.

You guys landed on the moon for goodness sake, where's that America gone?

> where's that America gone

It basically died when we became divided into two camps, neither of which can support any proposal if the other side supports it too. People are more concerned with feeling they've won an argument than actually achieving anything.

It's interesting because I'm very ideological about politics in the UK. I have a burning hatred for the party that just left power after 14 years to the point that would make most zealots look positively tame. However I will concede that the UK has made pretty good progress on energy transition with a fairly broad base of support from most major parties and a lot of that transition happened under the party I detest.

While the UK faces some ongoing challenges:

- Transmission bottlenecks in Scotland

- Dwindling opportunities for offshore wind construction

- Natural gas for heating in an old and poorly insulated housing stock

- Electricity prices tied to gas prices

- A generation of NIMBYs who don't want wind turbines ruining their view of transmission pylons and ecologically dead sheep pastures

- Lack of zonal pricing to incentivize more on-shore renewables

And needs to go further and faster I don't think energy generation falls into the same ideological divide there (though this may change with Reform UK and their questionable funding/astroturfing). Certainly net zero and 'green crap' remains contentious but from an actual building-the-thing perspective we're just quietly getting on with it.

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