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Comment by StopDisinfo910 | Hacker News Reader

The issue is that renewable tends to be intermittent and long-term storage is an open problem. You can do find in a day with battery but you can’t really produce a lot in the summer and use in winter.

It means you either need an alternative when production is too low such as coal or gas-fired power plants or a lot of capacity sufficiently stretched out than they are not stopped at the same time. Managing such a large grid with huge swings in capacity and making it resilient is a massive challenge. That’s why you end up with Germany building 70-ish new gas-fired power plants next to their alleged push towards renewable.

It’s probably doable but when you look at it from this angle nuclear starts to look good as an alternative.

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> You can do find in a day with battery but you can’t really produce a lot in the summer and use in winter.

Batteries aren't the only storage. The better options in my opinion are the places where you can use the landscape to your advantage. Pump a lake full when there's too much power and let it drain when there's too little.

Also in a connected grid setup, the sun always shines somewhere though that does come with potentially huge transmission losses from distance

> The better options in my opinion are the places where you can use the landscape to your advantage.

We already do that. France notably has a lot of hydropower and they pump water up when they don’t want to shutdown a nuclear unit.

The issue is that there is very little places where you could build new dams in Europe and water shortage is becoming a regular occurrence.

Not every dam has to be of the size of the Hoover dam. A single huge battery is also not practical.

Yes water shortage might be a problem if the river you're on runs dry. That's not often a problem though, plenty of major rivers. And a dam doesn't change the total amount that flows, it just changes when. As a result it might even help in lowering some flood risks.

You need a reliable source for energy. Pumped storage is not. They are mostly good for dealing with the fluctuations of energy supply and demand. It crucially requires water to operate. You can't do much when there's a drought. Also, did some googling. The world’s largest pumped‑hydro storage plant (Fengning, China) stores nearly 40 GWh, delivering 3.6 GW for about 10.8 hours when full. Thats not even a day.

There are really three options for reliable baseload: coal, gas, nuclear. Pick your poison.

Gas doesn't imply natural gas fwiw

You're looking for the biggest which isn't all that important. It's like saying you cannot deal with a difference in peak and through in production using a single power plant. For example, Norway has just 78TWh[1] in storage like that. Which is 2000x your example

And yes, I realize how well positioned Norway is for this. But you can put these wherever you have a stream and a big reservoir

1: https://energifaktanorge.no/en/norsk-energiforsyning/kraftpr...

all the easy pumped storage options have already been tapped. would require mega projects to create more. something only china can do these days :(

> Batteries aren't the only storage. The better options in my opinion are the places where you can use the landscape to your advantage. Pump a lake full when there's too much power and let it drain when there's too little.

It's also the oldest storage tech and I doubt there's a single place in Europe available to build more.

> Also in a connected grid setup, the sun always shines somewhere though that does come with potentially huge transmission losses from distance

The whole EU is in winter weather together.

> The whole EU is in winter weather together

Sure, less sunshine, significantly more wind.

No single source will do it all, no one is arguing that

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