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Comment by realusername | Hacker News Reader

No they aren't, there's no country on earth which can sustain a winter load with batteries.

In the next years, it doesn't make sense to use batteries to sustain winter load: it would be way too expensive. But batteries get cheaper quickly, such that it doesn't make sense to build expensive nuclear plants just for winter. What does make sense, until batteries are cheap enough, is natural gas during winter, plus (where available) wind energy and hydro / pumped storage, existing nuclear plants (optimised for winter), biomass (wood), photovoltaics in the mountain, and geothermal.

There is no country on earth which has spent anything like as much on developing storage as it has on fragile, unreliable, expensive nuclear plants.

Systems like these are just getting started.

https://stateofgreen.com/en/solutions/storing-heat-for-a-col...

> fragile, unreliable, expensive nuclear plants.

Nuclear is currently expensive, but you're 100% wrong on those other two. Also, more people die from installing and maintaining solar and wind turbines than have ever died from nuclear, so...

Yeah sure, it's right around the corner, I had the same conversation on HN 3 years ago haha.

Say what you want about nuclear plants but they work, right now and we have example of countries successfully creating a grid with it.

I can't say the same about the magical batteries.

Exponential growth is a funny thing. First it looks like nothing is happening, and all of a sudden everything has changed. Check out discussions about wind and solar some 10 years ago.

E: for reference from memory, it took about 50 years to install the first TW of solar. The next TW took 2 years, and the next TW is projected to take only 1 year, 2025.

For now it looks more like a flat curve than an exponential one. Batteries haven't followed PV at all, especially not for a grid scale usage.

Making batteries viable for home use is a very different story to make them viable for a grid.

> Making batteries viable for home use is a very different story to make them viable for a grid.

True. But both are stories from the same book. Meaning: If more homes install batteries and some become fully off-grid you will stabilize the whole grid without needing to install more power generation. This is exactly what happened in Pakistan (src: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/08/pakistan-energy-affo...) and I expect will happen all over the world as:

1. PV+battery prices continue falling

2. Climate change resulting in more sunny days (one of the very few upsides)

3. The need to become more self-sufficient due to energy price volatility due to shitty govt/shitty grid/shitty neighbors attacking your neighbors

Would be nice to see some subsidy from the govt (is EU listening?) like: "here's low interest loan to take your home off grid payable over 20+ years (expected lifetime of the whole PV+bat system) during which you promise you won't connect to grid".

So show me the model of renewables + batteries that would have been sufficient for all of the last 75 years in Germany and the UK. We do have the historical weather data so there is ZERO reason for all that handwaving.

Simulated wind-water-solar-battery in one of Australia grid is pretty close:

https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewable-gr...

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