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Comment by rswail | Hacker News Reader

We recently had an election in AU where "nuclear" was on the agenda as the (losing) party/coalition were promoting nuclear as a "solution" to our aging coal-generator fleet.

The trouble is that:

a) "baseload" is a misnomer, what is required is storage to cover periods when "the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow"

b) CSIRO (our government research organization) releases a regular report called "Gencost" [1]. It has shown regular decreases in solar and wind, with costs for other solutions (coal/gas/nuclear) growing during the same period

c) The problem for nuclear power in AU is doubled because there is no local infrastructure or engineering or industry for the nuclear fuel cycle

d) AU home solar is world leading, with now a government subsidy available for home battery storage to soak up the midday peak, one state (SA) regularly runs on 100% renewables

e) SMRs do NOT exist in a commercially deployable way. There are any number of research and demo-scale possible SMRs, but none that are immediately able to be deployed

f) SMRs are too SMALL to replace existing coal gen, especially compared to the capacity of solar and wind farms, with offshore wind only just being started in AU

[1] https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/ele...

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> "baseload" is a misnomer, what is required is storage to cover periods when "the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow"

"Storage" can't do that for more than smoothing out daily peaks. The only longer-term storage that matters when you look at the numbers is pumped hydro, and that's built out. That's why "baseload" is in fact quite relevant; it's way better to supply those critical needs via a highly reliable source.

First, "providing baseload" is a privilege you enjoy if you are the unconditionally cheapest provider of electricity at all times, not something that anyone ever needs you to do.

If you only need power for short periods of time when renewables are unavailable, then "constant output" plants like coal or nuclear are the last thing you want to build-- they are simply not worth it for the the short periods of time when renewables are down.

You want simple, cheap powerplants instead that trade off higher fuel costs for low capex, and that is currently gas. You want cheap MW (max power) from those plants instead of cheap MWh (energy), basically.

It's easy to be "unconditionally cheapest" when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. "Simple, cheap" power plants that burn a lot of expensive natural gas (or even worse, coal) are the current approach to that problem, which is not working very well. The point is to do better, and nuclear may be a very sensible choice since a single nuclear plant can replace a whole lot of natural gas peakers.

Nuclear power plants struggle with economics already at highest possible capacity factors (running 90% of the time).

If they get undercut by renewables most of the time, there is simply no way they can stay competitive.

Nuclear peaker plants are not ever gonna be a thing, because that makes no sense economically: High capex is the last thing you want for that usecase, and it implies that the economics for your plant have to stay decent for the next 30 years. Meanwhile batteries, solar and wind are still getting cheaper every year right now. This is the worst bet you could ever make as an investor.

> nuclear may be a very sensible choice since a single nuclear plant can replace a whole lot of natural gas peakers.

This argument does not help nuclear power if the equivalent number of gas plants is still cheaper than a single nuclear reactor (and built much faster).

> Nuclear power plants struggle with economics already at highest possible capacity factors (running 90% of the time).

In Ontario, Canada they are the third-cheapest (after hydro, and nat/methane gas); see Table 2:

* https://oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-20241018...

In previous years they have often been second-cheapest (after hydro): their 'ranking' depends on methane gas commodity prices.

Nuclear can be apparently cheap (its TCO is difficult to establish because gov funding, hot waste potentially breaking havoc in a distant future...) but never is when load-following, because load-following reduces the load factor, and a low load factor bumps up production costs.

Moreover nuclear's aptitude to load-following is vastly over-stated because it has too much inertia (even hot). Even France (shock-full of reactors) always needs to produce approximately 10% ( https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/energy?Metric=Share+of+... ) of its juice thanks to fossil fuel, for a non-negligible part ensuring load-following.

> Moreover nuclear's aptitude to load-following is vastly over-stated because it has too much inertia (even hot).

There is load-following thermally and load-following electrically. Newer nuclear designs allow for the steam to be diverted and quenched so they don't reach the generators.

Of course this is inefficient, but as you can see in the following link:

* https://www.ieso.ca/power-data § Supply

the Ontario nuclear plants basically run at full-tilt 24/7 to provide base load.

Hydro-electric is also supplying a bunch of base load, so if more nuclear can be built so that it takes up more of that hydro is doing, hydro can then be used in a more variable fashion (so perhaps (nat/methane) gas can be reduced and we have fewer GHGs released).

Which is a quirk of hindering renewable deployment.

All over Europe nuclear reactors are throttled down or even shut down for days/weeks because renewables lead to too low prices for the reactors to even cover wear and tear and fuel costs.

Given that renewables are the cheapest energy source in human history this will happen in every grid that is based on a free market principle.

In the monopolized markets the distributed aspects of renewables will mean that rooftop solar and storage enables home owners to largely disconnect from the grid if the monopoly starts to force new built nuclear power costs on the ratepayers.

In other words: Nuclear power is fucked unless it can either get the marginal cost to zero like a solar panel, i.e. impossible or get CAPEX low enough to act like a fossil gas peaker which again seems near impossible given the past 70 years of nuclear powers history and commercialization.

> Given that renewables are the cheapest energy source in human history

Not according to the energy contracts in Ontario as shown in the OEB report linked above.

Yes, the OEB report is for a paid off fleet. Sure, some investment in recent years but not even close to a new build.

The cost for the Darlington SMR is somewhere in the 25-35 cents/kWh range with the calculation assuming large learning effects to subsequent reactors and that the entire project goes on time and on budget.

Does that sound cheap to you?

Indeed!

Experts (International Energy Agency, McKinsey, etc.) are clear: renewables will produce the majority of electricity by 2050.

https://www.iea.org/commentaries/tripling-renewable-power-ca...

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/energy-and-materials/our...

This is inevitable (no other possibility is realistic), and this applies to France, where RTE (EDF's subsidiary that manages the electricity grid) has emphasized that 100% nuclear power is out of the question, and that more than 60% nuclear power would be utopian.

This trend is already clearly visible and welcomed by investors.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-fossil-renewa...

The cost of producing renewable electricity is increasingly lower than that of nuclear power.

https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-e...

During their operation, they do not consume fuel, produce waste, or expose people to a major accident, and are therefore and will be preferred.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-09/european-...

The surplus electricity sometimes produced by renewables will be leveraged by increasing storage capacity (electric vehicles, hydro pumped storage, etc.) as well as green hydrogen. It will gradually replace nuclear electricity, which is supposed to compensate for their variability, especially since the latter cannot adjust its production quickly and frequently enough ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41796580 ).

All of this will reduce the nuclear load factor and therefore increase its production cost (it is only profitable with a high load factor), with strong feedback (the higher the load factor, the more likely it will be).

This will increasingly favor the deployment of a system based primarily on renewables, meaning that nuclear electricity will become less and less useful and more and more expensive, making its fate (and therefore the profitability of the heavy investments required for its infrastructure) easy to predict.

A renewable-nuclear mix will doom the latter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udJJ7n_Ryjg

Yes, there are two types of load-following: "bump up the power", or "lower it". This also applies do renewables: not producing (many wind turbines are equipped with a braking system) or wasting an excess of power isn't as challenging as quickly producing more power, then less, then more... fine-tuning and for extended periods of time.

Yes, running at full-tilt 24/7 is way easier for a nuclear reactor than doing the load-following game (on every account: total cost, maintenance, risk...). They are built for it!

Hydro: yes, to an extent because load-following hydro is mainly done by pumped-storage, many dams are of the "run-of-the-river" type and cannot always load-follow: if there is no incoming (upstream) water they cannot produce any power.

The figures you give don't appear to reflect the fully loaded cost of providing power from new nuclear power plants. It looks to me like they just reflect operating costs on assets that are already paid for, or mostly paid for.

> It looks to me like they just reflect operating costs on assets that are already paid for, or mostly paid for.

In Ontario there used to be a government-owned utility, Ontario Hydro. They built all the nuclear plants (and everything else).

But at some point things were re-jigged so parts of Ontario Hydro could be privatized (the government still owns shares), but because of how it was broken up its debt could not be split up or given to any of the resulting components.

* https://www.oefc.on.ca/debtmanage.html

So a separate legal entity was created where the debt is now held, and rate payers give money to that corporation to pay off old debt (both nuclear and non-nuclear) as part of their rate.

Also worth noting that the nuclear plants in Ontario are going through a refit currently, so it's not like the plants were built and nothing has done with them except for OpEx; there's a whole bunch of CapEx happening right now (and has been for the last few years):

* https://www.brucepower.com/life-extension-program-mcr-projec...

* https://www.ans.org/news/article-6280/bruce-power-refurbishm...

* https://www.opg.com/projects-services/projects/nuclear/darli...

Yes, nuclear can be cost competitive if you ignore the bulk of the costs: aka construction and decomissioning.

Ontario is now planning on building another plant. Their own document says it won't pay for itself for 50 years, and that's assuming there are no cost overruns, which is a laughable assumption.

> Ontario is now planning on building another plant. Their own document says it won't pay for itself for 50 years, and that's assuming there are no cost overruns, which is a laughable assumption.

Well the current plants have been running for 4-5 decades and are in the middle of being refurbished to run for another 4-5 decades.

Only paying for itself for the life of the plant is actually a good thing: it means that it is basically being run at-cost with minimal profits being extracted from the public.

Unless the alternatives are significantly cheaper, either now or over the next 50 years

No wind? In Canada? With or without subsidies?

>Nuclear power plants struggle with economics already

Because they are over-regulated. Why? Because of nucleophobia, which is fueled by fossil fuel producers.

That's simply untrue and focusing on it will continue to result in nuclear failure after nuclear failure.

Nobody has some sort of proposal of a different regulatory scheme that is somehow cheaper. Even France, which built a ton decades ago, has completely failed for more than a decade at building. South Korea has been somewhat successful at building, but also sends execs to jail for faking parts approvals. But perhaps that would be cheap to fix.

What has changed since the mid 20th century is that construction labor is far more expensive in comparison to other things that can be done with that labor. Construction productivity has remained roughly constant over time, as manufacturing and other productivity has gone through the roof.

Nuclear is fundamentally a big construction project. SMRs weresypposed to be an attempt to make nuclear power a manufacturing project, not a construction project. But it turns out that construction projects like the BWRX300 are the only real SMRs that can be produced, after a decade of hype. Manufacturing SMRs like 747s is not any more real today than it was when the nuclear PR machine turned to it in the wake of the financial and construction disaster of the AP1000s at Summer and Vogtle.

The real story of nuclear is the need for super cheap labor, and excellent high-tech construction capacity. These two requirements are at odds with each other, because in societies with high tech construction skills, labor quickly becomes expensive.

Even places like China with lots of successful nuclear projects is only building a tiny tiny amount of nuclear when compared to their wind, solar, and batteries. China does everything, and they won't abandon nuclear completely because a nuclear workforce is essential for a country with superpower ambitions, but the nuclear power is there for the superpower ambitions, not the electricity generation.

I just don't think smrs work without figuring out Lftrs. Because lifters can use almost all the fuel, are inherently meltdown proof, you basically take away the two worst dangers of nuclear.

The issue with degradation of the piping and everything from the molten salts can probably be solved by a replacement cycle.

But to be fair, I have no idea how China's MSR is going

If the EU and US would each commit to build, fund 100+ NPPs over the next years then it would make sense to gear up for a scheme.

Unfortunately each plant is a fucking special snowflake. Due to new sites somehow requiring changes which is absurd, since the containment and everything under it should be 1:1 copy, right? Yes, because the NRC doesn't work like that. Designs are tweaked.

Anyway as you said it's a very expensive bespoke weld and pour festival.

It's funny you say that. Renewables are "cheap" precisely because a lot of the labor cost is offloaded to cheap labor countries with low regulations. There is basically no solar panel market outside of China, and that says something. It's a very messy process and benefits largely from China's willingness to not care.

Every single big renewable project is heavily backed by government and subsidies. Wind is big in Germany, because gov pushed it very hard, not because it's naturally competitive.

So far, I see a lot of ideologues pushing the "cheaper" argument even though it hasn't been true at all, and the long-term prospect don't look very good compared to nuclear. But it has more political support, so it is made to be more "competitive" and that's basically all there is to it.

Even residential solar only makes sense when people who install it get paid a lot more than the bulk electricity actually cost, if people had to pay themselves for both panels and storage it is largely a loss compared to regulated market price for electricity in many places in Europe.

Well said.

They are also built and run by public or quasi-public utilities. I don't think we have a lot of examples of the private sector building nuclear generating plants. Maybe they can do it better, when it's their own money on the line, and they don't have a legally granted monopoly protecting them.

Privatizing electricity in California resulted in massive underinvestment and forest fires as a result of poor maintenance.

Privatization only saves money if you ignore the price paid by surrounding communities.

I would not like to see a fully private nuclear plant.

Depends on how you do it. The electrical supply and demand markets can be privatized and that works quite well with few ancillary services needed.

Privatizing the grid is a shit show since it is a natural monopoly.

Privatization of electricity hands a company a monopoly

> which is not working very well

It's actually working great. Gas peakers are expensive to run, but not nearly as expensive and time consuming to deploy as nuclear - you could deploy a solar installation with matching gas capacity and still spend less and have it years earlier than the least expensive, fastest deploying nuclear power plant.

On top of that storage has been undercutting gas lately in terms of cost - especially now that it scaled up.

That is all affecting the economics of nuclear.

Combined storage and solar/wind will probably drop under combined cycle gas in a couple years, certainly it will for China.

> The point is to do better, and nuclear may be a very sensible choice since a single nuclear plant can replace a whole lot of natural gas peakers.

This does not align with reality.

Take a look at France. They generally export quite large amounts of electricity. But whenever a cold spell hits that export flow is reversed to imports and they have to start up local fossil gas and coal based production.

What they have done is that they have outsourced the management of their grid to their neighbors and rely on 35 GW of fossil based electricity production both inside France and their neighbors grids. Because their nuclear power produces too much when no one wants the electricity and too little when it is actually needed.

Their neighbors are able to both absorb the cold spell which very likely hits them as well, their own grid as the French exports stops and they start exporting to France.

You should check your sources. Very often the reverse is actually true. The recent years are not really representative because a lot of reactors were put on hold waiting for repairs and improvement.

There is also the fact that France added millions of people while not building new nuclear capacities, so of course at some point there is going to be overload without renewed investment.

Bug people like seems to want to put more money on renewable so that we can import even more electricity from Germany's coal plants (that makes up to 40% of their electricity generation in the winter when the wind is nowhere to be found).

I'm very curious where you find your data, because it's not at all what I have been able to get. If there is some source that clearly shows renewable superiority in the winter, I would really like to see it.

To be self-sufficient without coal, Germany needs to install 150GW of wind power still, and at current rate it will take at least 10 years. But I'm very curious what is their solution for when they get no wind for weeks on end, like it has happened recently. So far it seems to be, fire up the coal plant and take the cheap nuclear from your neighbor while posturing and virtue signaling about your superiority of not using nuclear.

Seems like people confuse the old school "gas peakers" which are basically just simple generators burning gasoline or diesel designed to be used intermittently, and advanced combined cycle natural gas, which are incredibly efficient. Natural Gas is super cheap in many markets, and it appears to be common theory that markets with limited natural gas simply haven't been explored sufficiently due to other fuels being cheaper (coal).

ACC Natural Gas + Solar/Wind + Batteries + actively priced load shedding market seems like a tremendous quartet.

Yes it's super cheap because there isn't carbon taxes.

In the US it is also super cheap because it is a byproduct of our fracking in The Dakotas.

It's a byproduct of a lot of oil production while also having its own reserves. My office used to look at an oil refinery that was miles away, and they were just burning the natural gas off in a huge plume, not worth trying to capture and combust for production.

The fracking is also in Arkansas and Texas and many other states. An amazing amount of gas continues to be discovered. I am not a geologist but assume that Australia could dedicate resources to explore fracking gas reserves and would come up with quite bit.

sidebar, but I just realized that Australia doesnt really have mountains to speak of. Tallest mountain is around the elevation of the typical Colorado Rockies valley towns. Australia may not have the 'cap traps' required to retain large amounts of gas in the various layers going down under ground.

We're not seeing a lot of realistic numbers published for the cost of a 100% renewables + storage grid because there is the X factor of "How many outages can you tolerate?"

Storage over a 24 hour period is one thing, the economics don't look difficult at all. In places like Upstate NY, however, usable insolation can vary by a factor of 3x between summer and winter. You can overbuild solar panels by 3x or you can add a few months of storage which costs a lot more than a few hours or days worth of storage. There is also the issue of

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

It would be great to have a backup energy source which is fully and economically dispatchable and environmentally benign but it's not there. I suspect there is some point of required reliability where adding nuclear baseload makes the grid more reliable economically compared to building months worth of storage. See

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403212...

also nuclear power plants are capable of load-following

https://www.oecd-nea.org/nea-news/2011/29-2/nea-news-29-2-lo...

it's just not an optimal use of the capital. The Gates foundation has been researching LMFBRs that use thermal batteries to improve load following abilities.

You might think dispatchable natural gas fired plants with some kind of carbon capture would help but with amine-based carbon capture the capital cost is high, just like with nuclear, so you are looking at a high multiple of what it would cost to add carbon capture to a coal plant that runs continuously. Calcium-based chemical cycling, metal-organic-frameworks and such offer some hope for lowering costs but probably not enough for those scenarios.

The real criticism of nuclear at this point in time is that any new plants are a decade out. It's a reason to start early, but no matter how you slice when the next NPP goes online in the US the amount of solar and wind added to the grid between here and now will dwarf it.

You raise good points, but I think none of the anti-renewable arguments are really show-stoppers, mainly because of how cheap things have become; solar panels are cheaper than glass windows now and prismatic LiFePo cells are down to ~$60 for 1kWh at single digit quantities (!!).

Figuring out the most economical mix of overprovisioning, improved grid connectivity, battery storage and more exotic longer term storage (synthetic gas/heat/fossils + capture/etc.) is a problem that is IMO best solved by the market over time.

I also think it is very telling how even a nation like France, which is basically in the perfect position to stick with nuclear power over renewables is still building out wind/solar rapidly. Nuclear power not even managing to defend its home turf makes it very questionable to fully bet on it elsewhere.

> You might think dispatchable natural gas fired plants with some kind of carbon capture would help but with amine-based carbon capture the capital cost is high, just like with nuclear, so you are looking at a high multiple of what it would cost to add carbon capture to a coal plant that runs continuously. Calcium-based chemical cycling, metal-organic-frameworks and such offer some hope for lowering costs but probably not enough for those scenarios.

I think you are missing far simpler solutions for what is in terms of TWh needed a tiny problem.

Why not just use biofuels, synfuels or hydrogen?

Whatever the aviation and the maritime shipping industries settles on since they are unable to in the foreseeable future decarbonize with batteries.

The US today produces enough ethanol for gas blending to run the entire grid for 16 days without help.

As we switch to BEVs it is trivial to repurpose that for the grid, while also ensuring that the inputs decarbonize as well.

Hydrogen has a major storage problem.

Let’s start with a syngas blend and work ourselves to perfect if that, of all things, is the problem that will make hydrogen infeasible.

We’re seeing the first prototype ferries with hydrogen propulsion being built and delivered as we speak.

Hydrogen does not work for ocean crossing routes, then it takes too much space in compressed form.

Liquid is always an alternative, but that comes with its own challenges.

Places where we already store natgas / methane interseasonally are good candidates, and more are available.

Hydrogen will leak out of about anything, and then there's hydrogen embrittlement.

Salt caverns seem good. And a bit of leakage is likely OK (the pass through storage via hydrolysis is far from 100% efficient anyway) and the only piping might be from hydrolysers and to turbines very close by, so should be manageable...

I'll check and see where the nearest salt cavern is --- ---- nope, nowhere around here.

Have you heard of this thing called a grid? I hear it is amazing at moving electricity around!

If you are not an ideologue the reality is that it's not really possible and not a serious option.

Modern society/civilisation relies on reliable power generation on cue, wanting to gamble that ability just to be able to remove nuclear because "it's too expensive" is beyond stupid. The cost of a long blackout is so much worse than anyone pretending otherwise is a fool.

As for storage solutions, even if they were existing and dirt cheap there is the problem of capacity sizing. How much do you build for? One week, two weeks, one month? If renewable generation cannot recover for a single day more than you planned for, you are done.

In a world where climate is constantly changing and the rate of change is increasing; it is crazy to be willing to put everything in solutions entirely depending on this.

We have to build renewables, they make sense for the low hanging fruit, but only doing renewable is just foolish. And this is exactly why nuclear makes sense, no matter how much it costs.

People on HN all seem to be venture capitalist, only thinking about cost/profits as if that should be sole motivator for doing things. That's just sad.

But how often is it cloudy and windless for weeks at a time? And for those once-every-few-years scenarios, why shouldn't we build (far cheaper) carbon-captured natural gas peaker plants?

Besides, you've got to keep in mind that we aren't going to be building for yearly-average kWh consumption. Companies will be building overcapacity to take advantage of high-demand/low-supply peak pricing.

I don't think it is unlikely that we'll end up with a situation where PV on an overcast day is enough for "baseload", with the practically-free electricity on sunny/windy days opening up new economic opportunities.

> But how often is it cloudy and windless for weeks at a time?

'“Energy Droughts” in Wind and Solar Can Last Nearly a Week, Research Shows':

* https://www.pnnl.gov/news-media/energy-droughts-wind-and-sol...

I think it would be location-dependent (low risk that (e.g.) the UK would be windless for long stretches of time, especially off the coast).

Not at continental scale, and grids are or will soon be at this scale.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403211...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09601...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096014811...

I agree generally, but is carbon-captured natural gas generation actually a thing? The only carbon capture I've heard of is at the gas production site removing CO2 from the reservoir gas and pumping it back underground - that's not after combustion. (And the pumping it back underground hasn't been particularly successful, eg https://www.boilingcold.com.au/regulator-limits-chevrons-tro... )

If it was only a matter of 'once-every-few-years' then current emergency capacity will suffice. The problem is that:

A) It happens often enough to be a problem emergency capacity can't handle.

B) Natural gas is not always an option (especially when Russia is the only readily available seller in the area and you DON'T want to be dependent on a potentially hostile neighbor).

C) Existing storage solutions require a massive investment in local solutions, or in the national grid if storage is centralized.

We need to re-think the entire idea about energy always being cheap and available, while somehow preventing those with more money from simply monopolizing supply by outbidding everyone else. You won't solve that with batteries. Many therefore try to maintain the current situation by doing this the old way.

A. We handle dankelflaute's now, and as long as we don't decommission gas peakers, we'll still be able to continue to handle them.

B. Europe has lots of natgas storage. 100 days of storage isn't enough for independence from Russia now, but if we're only using gas for dankelflaute's 5 days of the year, thats ~20 years of storage.

Batteries are extremely cost competitive today for overnight storage, and are marginally cost competitive for weekly storage. That's enough to handle everything except for a dankelflaute. In which case see above.

"Storage" can synthesize hydrocarbons, i.e. fuel, which can then be stored forever, until energy is needed.

This was already possible by the time of WWII, but now there are many methods in development for reducing carbon dioxide by electrolysis, and then use the product to synthesize longer hydrocarbons, which have higher efficiency than the older methods.

The round-trip efficiency of this will always be worse than for batteries, which remain a better option for short time storage, but synthesizing fuel will be a valid method for storing energy for the winter during the summer, and also for applications where batteries are unsuitable, like aircraft and spacecraft.

We can also do things like desalinate water and pump it uphill when solar is plentiful and prices are negative. No need to get hydrocarbons involved.

Creating fresh water and pumping it uphill to a reservoir that is uphill of a turbine would help solves two problems in Southern California.

If you compare the combination of renewables and batteries to pumped hydro it loses badly.

It's like pumped hydro with a very predictable rainstorm directly above it every day. You'd be able to get by with a much smaller reservoir.

> "Storage" can't do that for more than smoothing out daily peaks.

See the system described in the OP link at this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45012942

Long term literally dirt cheap thermal storage coupled with extreme cost optimized PV that would provide 600 C heat 365/24/7 for as little as $3/GJ, on par with combustion of inexpensive natural gas. Complementary with diurnal storage from batteries, this would be a complete solution to the renewable intermittency problem.

Can sand batteries work? Recent post on HN about use in Finland https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45112653

For district heating, sure. For electricity? Yes, in theory, but not at efficiencies that would make financial sense.

do efficiencies matter that much when you don't need much and can "charge" with "free" energy?

Higher efficiency storage can outbid you for the "free" energy.

perhaps, but the other way around is a possible scenario as well, because it may still be cheaper to have inefficient storage when the way you store the energy is expensive (e.g. some batteries may have very high efficiency, but you need difficult to obtain materials)

LFP batteries are > 95% efficient and only use common elements.

It was just an example for explanation

It's your core argument

> when the way you store the energy is expensive

batteries are cheap

it's an illustrative example for my argument

> batteries are cheap

a metal box for storing synthetic fuel is cheaper

Isn't that to store energy as heat so you don't produce it by other means during winter? Seems to address a specific class of storage needs

Baseload is quite irrelevant, because baseload also doesn't supply those critical needs. "Baseload" is by definition power production that can't follow the demand curve, and thus can't provide the power to keep the grid stable. It's as bad as solar and wind in this way, it's just that instead of having a fixed but variable supply curve it has a fixed but flat supply curve.

What you want is dispatchable power. Gas peaker plants for instance. Or overbuilt solar + batteries. Not baseload.

A typical car battery stores 60 kWh (the average capacity of models is increasing), so, charged during the day using inexpensive renewable electricity (particularly solar), it can power a household during one of the rare winter nights with insufficient wind.

Case in point: France. A household consumes an average of 14 kWh of electricity per day. The capacity of electric cars will exceed 500 GWh before 2035 and 2000 GWh between 2040 and 2050.

Trucks, utility vehicles, and stationary batteries (domestic and industrial) will add to this. Batteries from retired vehicles will increasingly be converted into static batteries before being recycled (see "Redwood Materials" in the US).

In California, when the sun is at its peak (midday), solar power produces up to three-quarters of the electricity. Batteries are charged in the afternoon, when solar electricity is cheap, and released in the evening, when Californians return home. At their peak consumption, around 8 p.m., batteries can supply up to 30% of the state's electricity.

Just to clarify for anyone who's confused... that's an EV battery, not the 12V lead-acid that's in an ICE vehicle.

>> A household consumes an average of 14 kWh of electricity per day.

If there is a motivation, consumed amount for particular cloudy day could be 1\4 easily. Simply do the laundry, other energy intensive task next day.

“Simply do the laundry, other energy intensive task next day.”

lol the single life

you forgot gas

One would think people would learn from the disastrous results of the German Energiewende, where this has already been tried, but no.

The problem is that the issue of intermittent energy generation is unsolved. It is currently not feasible to use batteries for base load needs, it would be insanely expensive. Some day perhaps, but not yet.

There was never a technically solid plan to solve this issue by the German Greens, just wishful thinking. They undertook this massive project without having the faintest clue about the underlying physics and financials, which is hard to believe but true. The overwhelming majority of green party members are from the humanities, not STEM.

So you either have a lot of pumped hydro, in which case great, or you don’t, which is the case nearly everywhere but the nordics and perhaps Switzerland.

Solar is much better than wind btw, wind is simply a costly mistake as it is a lot more intermittent than solar. The math doesn’t add up.

> It is currently not feasible to use batteries for base load needs, it would be insanely expensive.

The CSIRO report says that nuclear is almost 2x more expensive than renewables even after factoring in all costs of storage and interconnects.

> Solar is much better than wind btw, wind is simply a costly mistake as it is a lot more intermittent than solar.

That depends on the location. Insolation and seasonality vary depending on distance from the equator, among other factors. Also, solar and wind are negatively correlated on both seasonal scales and intraday scales, so it often makes sense to mix the two if you're in Europe, rather than pick a simple winner.

Unlike solar, power wind makes very little sense even if storage improves. This is true even in first principles so technological progress is unlikely to overcome these limitations.

This is a very uneducated take. Wind absolutely makes sense in plenty of locations.

I myself am located on the west coast of Scotland and we get most of our energy from wind. Solar panels make much less sense here we tend to get much less light than most places in the world.

What's with the utterly uninformed takes on energy on HN?

Wind makes extremely good sense and has been making good sense for 30 years or more now depending on where on the globe you are looking. There is a ton of FUD about it but it is practical, affordable, available and relatively fast to deploy. Moreover there is readily financing available to take care of the capex.

There are 7 MW turbines deployed regularly

https://www.enercon.de/en/turbines/e-175-ep5

And there are 10 MW turbines and higher on the drawing board. Offshore and onshore options are available.

> What's with the utterly uninformed takes on energy on HN?

Culture war, innit.

> it is practical, affordable, available and relatively fast to deploy

It is none of those things.

Sorry, but you are not arguing in good faith. There 1.1+ TW of installed capacity producing approximately 30 to 35% of that installed capacity continuously. Turbine payback time is less than a decade.

You are in the most literal sense tilting at windmills here.

I mean, you didn't address what I said, you just looped back to what you originally said.

In what way was the energiewwende disastrous, give actual numbers.

German electricity production is increasingly dominated by renewables, in the first quarter of 2025 (which had unfavourable weather conditions) 46.9% of electricity was produced by renewables (mostly wind). Coal and gas has been declining steadily and Germany regularly exports electricity to nuclear focused France. Currently on average Germany is a net importer from France, but that does mean little because of the way cross border trade is an integral part of the European grid (note that Germany also is a net importer from Denmark whos grid is largely wind based).

So to me that sounds like a success story.

The cost of electricity is very high or at least it was during the latest period for which I have data, namely the second half of 2023:

45.65 US cents per kilowatt-hour for households in Germany compared to 16.06 US cents per kilowatt-hour for US households.

Which mostly comes from very high taxes to promote efficiency gains.

The interesting question is: What is the wholesale cost + subsidies?

Subsidies which now are being phased out for new production, or in some cases even lead to companies having to bid to get the privilege to build.

End consumer prices are utterly unusable to determine success or failure of the Energiewende. They are also utterly useless to compare across nations, as they are made up of very different components - e.g. in Germany only 40% is determined by market factors, in France the price is held artificially low by massive subsidies https://www.lemonde.fr/en/energies/article/2023/04/21/france... and so on.

50% of the price in France is also taxes and network maintenance fees so your argument does not make sense.

The retail price is so high because it is a failure of both technology and politics. The taxes are that high because politically they decided to over-invest in a bad technological choice; pretending otherwise is an extremely bad faith argument.

During the second half of 2023, the average price of electricity for residences in France was about 0.273 US dollars per kWh.

I don't understand "in Germany only 40% is determined by market factors". Do you mean that 60% of the price consists of taxes?

All kinds of fees (e.g. for the grid) and taxes, yes. It differs by year and depending on which surcharges were added/removed through laws. E.g. one part was for renewable subsidies and that's been removed in '22.

40% source is here (German, slide 7) https://www.bdew.de/media/documents/BDEW_Strompreisanalyse_0...

Consumer prices are now down to below 0.30 €/kwh again for new contracts (takes a few clicks for anyone) - they were mostly high previously because of Russia's war. This influence on electricity production was removed.

"Disastrous" by what metric? What are you even talking about? Germany went from >50% fossil fuel (mostly coal, not even gas!) to >60% renewables for electricity within the last two decades.

This is a huge success already.

I don't think it's a huge success, considering they're unable to meet their own demands for electricity, instead driving up energy prices in neighboring countries as well.

The problem of meeting demand is in industrial use and residential heating, both of which aren’t typically electrified in Germany. The problem has more to do with an active war and an industrial sector built on cheap Russian gas.

Yes, and if they want to net-zero all their energy, not just their electricity, they will need to do some mix of:

1. electrify those applications currently served by gas 2. import or manufacture carbon-neutral synthetic gas 3. buy a heck of a lot of offsets

And since we don't have the technology to remove CO2 from the atmosphere efficiently, buying offsets is spending a lot of money fooling yourself.

This. Germany has been strong arming policies around electricity in the EU for quite a while. Forcing their neighbors to sell their electricity for cheap when it is the most expensive in the market while assuming none of the costs and risks.

And they are disrupting neighbors' energy production economics when they offload their overproduction precisely when nobody wants it.

That's German superiority complex in all it's "glory".

That is largely due to the war in Ukraine and Russian gas/oil being a big no-no in Europe right now.

Continuing to burn fossil fuel is simply not an option. Not if we want to comfortable keep living on this planet.

None of the European countries meat their energy demands by themselves. All of them regularly import and export electricity from/to their neighbors. That's a good thing and is driving down electricity prices not up.

The reason countries buy electricity from their neighbors is because it's cheaper not because they couldn't meat the demands themselves.

Now Germany is by no means perfect, heating is largely gas based which increases emissions. Ironically the law that was trying to change this, had a big counter campaign that likely contributed to the change of government.

So while the greens energiewende are often blamed for Germanys dependency on gas (although the dependency had been going for much longer), it's the conservatives who likely had a much bigger impact on Germany sticking with gas by preventing to move heating to electricity.

It's a huge success considering where they would have been if not for doing that, and then energy prices would have been higher still.

It depends on how you measure success… Has that change improved the economy and well-being of the Germans? I do not know, I’m only pointing out that change to renewables does not necessarily mean “success”.

First: This whole reneable thing was done to reduce negative externalities from pollution and CO2 emissions that were simply not paid for previously.

Arguing that "the economy would be better of without pollution/emission limits" is a bit like arguing that dumping trash in the next river is cheaper than proper disposal: Sure, your industrialists are gonna save a few bucks right now, but someone will have to pick up the bill regardless-- with interest.

I found that it is much better for my household budget to dump my trash in my neighbor's yard rather than to pay for trash pickup.

Oh, no, I was not arguing that, I was simply stating that becoming "green" is not necessarily better per se. There are many factors to consider.

Sure, but people's rent and bills are due now and if they can't pay up, you can't gaslighting them with "your sacrifice is necessary for the future of the environment" which is a luxury belief.

Why haven't shareholders of energy companies also made sacrifices to save the environment? How come only the consumers have to?

Do you understand why people are pissed off with the switch?

> "your sacrifice is necessary for the future of the environment" which is a luxury belief.

The cost of food, water, energy and other things are going up *because* of climate change. What kinda "luxury belief" is that?

Source? Because EU pollutes less now than before, but my groceries are even more expensive so your point is moot. So why should I accept to be spit-roasted like this with no return on my sacrifices?

Maybe greedy corporate profiteering is the real culprit here squeezing people and not people using the AC or driving to work?

There is absolutely overwhelming evidence that climate change is impacting agriculture.

You're dodging my question. I asked why hasn't our economic sacrifice to save the environment resulted in a reduction in grocery prices, if environmental damage is what's causing them to go up? We reduced the economic damage but prices are still going up. So what gives? Is it environmentalism or corporate greed?

Has CO2 returned to pre-industrial levels? Has the ice shelf re-frozen? How about permafrost?

We are not yet at the point where things are good again yet. We are just reducing further damage at this point.

Because there are lags in the system? Because we are not doing enough? Do you always expect immediate feedback on everything you do? If that's the case I guess you never invest in anything because that's by definition a bet that it will make things better (or less worse) in the future.

So your proposal is to further delay making anyone pay for changes, because previous generations profited? So at the end of the chain (which will likely not be very long anymore) some generation will be completely screwed.

> future of the environment

The environment consists of natural resources. Those resources have value and are "owned" by the people. You can save money by not changing the oil in your car, right up until the engine seizes up. Preserving the value of valuable assets through proper care and maintenance isn't exactly a high concept abstract concept.

> Sure, but people's rent and bills are due now and if they can't pay up, you can't gaslighting them with "your sacrifice is necessary for the future of the environment" which is a luxury belief.

My point of view is that "we have to curb emissions now before consequences grow too dire" is not a "luxury belief": the actual luxury is/was consuming fuel and fossil products without ever paying for the externalities. It was a luxury we could not actually afford at any point, basically just got it on credit in the past, and all that credit is coming due within the century.

> Why haven't shareholders of energy companies also made sacrifices to save the environment? How come only the consumers have to?

Because overall most of the benefit did go to consumers. People basically got a gallon of gas for 30 cents in 1960 when it probably needed to be a dollar or more, but companies like Shell only ever saw a small fraction of that retail price, and there is absolutely no way you could claw back that difference (or anything close, really) from them.

> Do you understand why people are pissed off with the switch?

I do understand the feeling of getting things denied that you took for granted, but I have little sympathy for selfishness.

>the actual luxury is/was consuming fuel and fossil products without ever paying for the externalities.

Then why do current generations have to pay for the profits that the previous generations have banked?

>but companies like Shell only ever saw a small fraction of that retail price, and there is absolutely no way you could claw back that difference

YES, nothing we can do about the corporate overlords who screwed us, let's instead claw it back from the current generation of people instead of from Shell shareholders, that's will go down well politically for sure and not cause extremist rise to power. How is this not a luxury belief?

>I do understand the feeling of getting things denied that you took for granted, but I have little sympathy for selfishness.

It's not selfishness to afford necessities for a decent life especially when more and more of your paycheck goes towards taxes and necessities.

>Then why do current generations have to pay for the profits that the previous generations have banked?

Life isn't fair and time travel doesn't exist. We are stuck with the world we have now and have to deal with the realities, including suffering the consequences for things not your fault. It isn't fair that a son gets cancer because his mother smoked around him all his life, but he is still the one that has to go through chemo.

>Life isn't fair

This argument can be used to justify whatever actions you want. You know that, right?

For example, I'm gonna take your house and when you ask why, it's because "life isn't fair".

However, various forms of fairness to balance out past wrong doings can always be achieved if desired, but it usually requires force or democratically if over 50% of people can unite on it.

>This argument can be used to justify whatever actions you want

Yes, which is why I wrote more than 3 words. It is why I used the cancer analogy. This generation is left holding the bag, and it has to be dealt with. Stomping your foot and saying it's not fair does nothing to cancer, nor does it do anything to climate change. I’m not saying a specific policy decision is right or wrong. I’m saying this generation has to deal with it, regardless of fairness.

> Then why do current generations have to pay for the profits that the previous generations have banked?

Because the vast majority of "profits" (externalities that were not paid for) were not banked, they were simply not paid.

Even if every person that enjoyed cheap fossil products in the past had the price difference on some separate bank account, taking that to fund environmental policies would be very difficult in western countries because of democracy and demographics (very difficult to get majorities when working against the interests of elderly voters).

> YES, nothing we can do about the corporate overlords who screwed us, let's instead claw it back from the current generation of people instead of from Shell shareholders, that's will go down well politically for sure and not cause extremist rise to power. How is this not a luxury belief?

Again, the Shell corporate overlords only siphoned off a very small fraction of the gains, even taking the whole corporation would be completely insufficient. The main beneficiaries in the past were not Shell and BP, but the end consumers instead.

Just heaping blame on corporations or past generations is not helping anything. You could certainly nationalize the whole petroleum industry and confiscate pension funds, but approaches like that have very detrimental side effects.

> It's not selfishness to afford necessities for a decent life especially when more and more of your paycheck goes towards taxes and necessities.

I would argue that if you discover that a past lifestyle was financed by unsustainably pushing the hidden costs of energy elsewhere (and into the future), then still refusing to pay those hidden costs after the discovery is the very definition of selfish.

It's cheaper for the current generation to deal with climate change than to ignore it.

You're effectively advocating for some small subset of that generation to try to disadvantage another larger subset, at a net loss to society, and hope they don't damage themselves in the process.

While complaining about selfishness of previous generations.

Depends on the country, but overall I'll say the opposite is true: cheaper is to ignore it. Climate change will not stop even if Germany switched to 100% renewables. And globally it is also not a top priority.

Basically this. But he is probably rich enough to not care because the effort that will be asked of him will be small relative to his purchasing power.

So, he can pretend to be "good" for doing the right thing, while more unfortunate people will pay the real cost without any guarantee that the climate situation will improve and that their children will have a chance at a "better life". Not that they care that much because children are becoming unaffordable for much of the lower class.

The problem with the green ideology is that it's a global problem and clearly global fossil fuel use reduction isn't happening. And the countries using it don't care because not using it is much worse than the promise of a better world in the future. If your life is shit right now (compared to the rich world) the promise of a better world far out in the future is just propaganda.

Unsurprisingly you got downvoted. It is a very unpopular opinion on HN. But I agree with you, the math does not add up. I have looked at the data and it makes no sense. Germany still needs to build a shit ton of wind turbines (150GW) and they are already decommissioning the first install, which is costing them a lot of money and is requiring them to think about the recycling, which will cost a lot of money. At some point we will know the true cost of wind power at least, I hope.

Germany's electricity price is almost twice of its "dirty" nuclear neighbor (France). Proof is in the pudding as they say. But most here seem to be unwilling to even look at the pudding, let alone eat it.

There's another Australian state, Tasmania that also runs on 100% renewables, mostly hydro. There are plans to export more of that power to other states.

Hydro is pretty great with a few caveats. Flooding remain a massive problem if there is a failure, as the world most deadliest power plant accident was a hydro power plant with a death toll between 26,000 to 240,000 people. An other major issue is the extinction of species, as is currently occurring in Europe and especially in the northern parts. There are technologies to allow for migrating fish to bypass hydro power plants without chopping them to bits, through the effectiveness of the bypass tend to work against the power output of the plant.

100% renewable until the dams dried up and they flew in diesel generators (worse than coal) to prop up the state, reversing several years of environmental progress.

That event is illustrative of the fundamental problem here. Green energy proponents pretend it never happens and do not factor diesel emissions into the cost of hydro and other solutions.

Another common way they mislead is by pretending that emissions from gas peaking plants are not inherently associated with solar and wind generating, even though they would not exist without them.

It's a kind of sleight of hand or green washing that should be called out more frequently.

100% renewable does not exist. Not in '100% hydro' Tasmania or anywhere else.

On unconnected islands. If Tasmania had the interconnects to export their power they could have reversed those to import solar from the mainland.

g) AU is very well suited for solar, due to the confluence of abundant desert making land-use a non-issue, high irradiance per m^2, low seasonality of irradiance, and large landmass which generates statistical diversification due to lower temporal coupling between plants.

This applies to where most of the human population live currently.

People who don't live in such regions are likely to underestimate solutions that work well in these places.

> AU home solar is world leading, with now a government subsidy available for home battery storage to soak up the midday peak, one state (SA) regularly runs on 100% renewables

I feel we're going to keep seeing "solar doesn't work" posts in decades to come, long past when many areas of the world will already be on 100% renewables. It turns out that incremental deployment is a superpower.

There's no longer any good reason for AU not to be at >100% solar at midday every single day.

> SMRs do NOT exist in a commercially deployable way

.. while this is more of a problem. I could jokingly say that SMRs are a conspiracy by Big Turbine to sell more turbines. Also don't forget the need for water cooling, which may be a critical problem in AU.

In Poland we're seeing government slowly taking actions against people owning solar. Turns out, people were paying a lot in taxes for electricity and this money is now not present in the budget. Recent development is an incoming ban on energy storage beyond certain size. They want you to give energy basically for free to the grid during the day (when you're at work) and buy the energy from the grid during the night (charging cars). Electricity prices are not even that high now, bills are mostly some transfer fees. I imagine the same will be/is the case in all countries.

> c) The problem for nuclear power in AU is doubled because there is no local infrastructure or engineering or industry for the nuclear fuel cycle

One might say this is an advantage, with no home industry asking for local supply chains to be built up (at significant cost and risk). Solar panels, batteries and wind turbines are not generally made in Australia, right? For the fuel cycle, Urenco for enrichment, and Westinghouse or Orano for the uranium processing and fuel fabrication would be possible deals with allies.

> e) SMRs do NOT exist in a commercially deployable way. There are any number of research and demo-scale possible SMRs, but none that are immediately able to be deployed

SMRs are not the entirety of nuclear, and were not the entirety of the Coalition nuclear plan. Large reactors do exist and are being built around the world. Rosatom are able to do so (Egypt, Turkey, Bangladesh), KEPCO has done so in the UAE, and China is exporting to Pakistan. As an aside, a GE-Hitachi BWRX-300 first-of-a-kind (not demo-scale or research) is being built in Darlington Canada, so SMRs are being deployed.

> f) SMRs are too SMALL to replace existing coal gen, especially compared to the capacity of solar and wind farms, with offshore wind only just being started in AU

This is why the Coalition plan proposed large reactors in addition to SMRs. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/feb/04/nucle...

> One might say this is an advantage

I'm baffled that anyone could propose this as a good thing. I've worked in industries that are supported - just smaller than the US and the price gouging is substantial. Parts will be designed for the US market, we need to adapt. Bonus points when buying incompatible European / US designs.

Solar panels, batteries, and wind turbine have all the necessary ancillary parts in warehouses close to where they are needed. They also have all the expertise, the cranes, the transport regulations nailed down.

I guess the shear quantity of land that AU has available for solar and wind takes away a lot of the issues for you guys?

Land cost isn't a strong limit on renewables even in Europe.

It's interesting that this country with all the spare land is also a world leader in rooftop solar.

That rooftop solar is delivering the cheapest consumer electricity in history.

Amazingly, the hardware costs and labor costs for rooftop solar are the same as the USA and sensible regulations around permitting and training have dropped the cost by 2/3rds.

Well it all does absolutely nothing to store energy.

Ahem

https://colliebattery.com.au/

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