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Comment by nonethewiser | Hacker News Reader

Yes, because you can't just increase capacity with solar. It has to be backed up by base power. Add 10% solar? OK now you need 10% from natural gas, nuclear, oil, etc. You need to add both solar and something durable then you can just use the solar until you cant.

Look what happened in Portugal when it got cloudy.

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This comment is always so strange to me - do you really, seriously believe that the people setting up the grids never thought about dunkelflaute? And I don't mean that in an attacking way, I'm genuinely curious about your thoughts there.

Like, yes, we're aware. At least in the german south we have the opposite problem right now. We are getting negative electricity prices (you get paid for taking some) more often because we have more electricity than we can use due to solar, at least during the day. Proper power storage is being built at this very moment all over the country.

Aside from dunkelflaute, the wind is statistically stronger when solar power generation is low, so at night and when it's super cloudy. And dunkelflaute is a couple days to weeks per year. (german perspective, don't know enough about the other countries' grids)

Regarding that problem in portugal, you misunderstood something there. The big 2025 power outage wasn't caused by clouds, it was an combination of localized blackouts and a sudden power _surge_ which caused a cascading failure which couldn't be stabilized by the conventional power plants even though on paper they had the capacity. How did you get the idea it had anything to do with "cloudy" weather?

RE "... dunkelflaute is a couple days to weeks per year..." My guess is its VERY expensive to build the needed storage so the supply reliability matches the current reliability 99.99%? ? ( in my area there has never been any unintended power outages for several years ) Which is why its never been done? Then again maybe people will be more tolerant of the situation. I've always though smart meters could always have a "mode" to reduce everyone's max demand to a small amount ...like a few hundred watts ...too help handle extended periods of dunkelflaute

Open cycle gas turbines are the perfect low CAPEX high OPEX backup. They are what we currently use to manage the once a year winter storm.

Force them to run on decarbonized fuels like ammonia, hydrogen, synfuels or biofuels (with decarbonized inputs) when even the backup needs to be decarbonized.

People setting up the grids answer to politicians. They do what they can within the constraints given by public policy. If public policy is completely idiotic, like the one in germany, there's no much they can do other than try to duct tape whatever they can.

Electricity demand is elastic, and electricity is dynamically priced. Plenty of industries are able and willing to reduce their consumption to avoid paying 100x more than usual, or even get paid to reduce their consumption.

A data center with backup generators can easily switch from grid power to generator power. If you're installing those generators for redundancy reasons anyway, why not make some extra bucks by signing a first-load-to-shed contract with the power company?

> Electricity demand is elastic,

This is complete bullshit for the vast majority of industrial use cases.

Yes, but not for the vast majority of industrial energy consumption, because of the outsized consumption of electric arc furnaces and a few other things like that.

That are most efficient in capital terms when running continuously.

Yes, that is certainly true of aluminum smelters, but precisely because they are so energy-intensive, their capital cost is a smaller contributor to the cost of their product than, say, a pharmaceuticals plant or a machine shop.

Steel EAFs cannot be run continuously, no matter how much capital efficiency you might hope to gain by doing so. It's inherently a batch process.

Continuous flow process plants like oil refineries are also very energy-intensive, but on the other extreme from things like an EAF, are very tricky to ramp up and down. But most of their energy usage is thermal at relatively moderate temperatures, which is much easier to store than the high-exergy energy needed for things like EAFs, aluminum pots, and data centers.

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