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Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

If solar or wind are cheaper than the fuel for gas plants you can save money by deploying them.

Here a blog with an interactive website to explore that:

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

> This means renewables are economically worthwhile based solely on the fuel savings they provide. Even if they would never fully replace fossil power plants, but only reduce how much fuel those plants consume, they would be worth it. Simply reducing fossil fuel use during sunny or windy periods—or when batteries charged from these periods are available—saves more money than the entire investment in renewables. That's how remarkably cheap solar, wind, and batteries have become—and precisely why they're winning around the world today.

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You factored in a new grid and backup nuclear plants/gas power plants requiring >100B investments in Germany or Tesla Megapacks in excess of 100 metric tons? Take a look at what is needed to make Germany “green” by a reputable and independent institute: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p...

I skimmed the study you linked. It has a focus on the social aspects of renewable energy, namely would the population react with acceptance or resistance (or varying degrees thereof ) and is divided into the corresponding scenarios which influence the outcome. That said, the summary clearly states that it is both technically feasible and more cost efficient if suffiency with renewable is realized if you can build on wide social acceptance.

I think this paints your statements in a different light. You omitted the studies focus on social aspects.

Well, 5 years later past publication and with “the highest electricity prices, a high carbon footprint compared to neighboring countries, challenges with network stability and 3 years in a recession with major mass layoffs in the news every week” I can reassure you that the math of cost efficiency was certainly off and the population has serious concerns about the feasibility.

I do trust their math on carbon emissions and capacity calculations wrt to renewable energy and gas power plants though.

So, you take the results on their calculations, divorcing them completely from the preconditions and all variables;not to mentioned outdated data - and we should take this as the base of our future argument?

Fraunhofer’s own math says 2050 electricity demand is ~700–750 TWh (≈80 GW average load), yet they assume 500–750 GW PV + wind — that’s 6–9× average demand and 5–7× today’s installed base (p. 15). On top of that, they still need 100–150 GW gas turbine backup plus major battery storage (p. 17), i.e. almost the whole peak load duplicated in flexible backup. In their model this cuts CO₂ by >95 % vs. 1990 (p. 11), which I accept technically. But given we already see close-call outages in Germany during “Dunkelflauten,” and given that today’s reality is ~40 ct/kWh for households instead of the 7–9 ct/kWh Fraunhofer projects (p. 65 ff.), I find their economic modeling divorced from the trajectory we’re actually on.

Can you follow?

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