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Comment by StopDisinfo910 | Hacker News Reader

You are entirely missing the point. The issue is what do you do when you have no renewable because it’s the winter and there is no sun and no wind. German answer to that - like it or not - is building gas fired power plants and using coal in the meanwhile. That and buying a ton of nuclear energy from France a fact you are conveniently forgetting.

The ratios you quote are meaningless. The issue is that it can’t scale so as to fully decarbonise the grid. Thankfully the current German government seems to finally have seen the light.

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'no sun and no wind' is not actually a thing that happens. What happens is less sun during the day and more or less wind in different places in Europe. This is a problem that can be solved through a combination of excess capacity, long distance transmission of energy, and storage, affordably and with existing technology. It's been obvious for a long time that a fully renewable grid can work, and Europe is rapidly moving towards that. Gas turbines are a reasonable stop-gap which will slowly get pushed out of generation as the proportion of renewables and storage grows.

> It's been obvious for a long time that a fully renewable grid can work

It’s far from obvious to me.

There are literally no exemple of one ever running and some of the technological challenges are still open questions at the moment.

I generally think proponents of renewables are overselling the idea and significantly minimising the challenges they pose at scale. They definitely have a place in the energy mix but I don’t personally believe they are the solution.

Mostly renewable has already been achieved, 100% renewable is on track and economically feasible.

   In December 2021, South Australia set a new record for renewable energy generation and resilience, after running entirely on renewable energy for 6.5 consecutive days.

  In 2022, it was stated that South Australia could soon be powered by only renewable energy.

  70 per cent of South Australia's electricity is generated from renewable sources.

  This is projected to be 85 per cent by 2026, with a target of 100 per cent by 2027.

~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_South_Australia

The long term strategy is H2:

https://h2-global.org/the-h2global-instrument/

And gas plants are what is closed to H2 and can be switched over easiest. But H2 is only viable once renewable production exceeds demands during long stretches of time. Otherwise it is always better to use the energy directly or use short term storage (batteries) which are also growing exponentially: https://battery-charts.de/battery-charts/

Sorry, you are all emotion and provide wrong statements. What I wrote directly contradicted your statements and proved them wrong, but now you say they are missing the point? Reducing fossil fuel consumption by 50% within 10 years is an achievement. There are always things that could be done in a better way. But let's be real here.

And yes Germany imports electricity from France: https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE...

That is kind of the point of having an integrated grid.

But 19TWh. While producing 470TWh. 4%. That is not ... a lot. And in 2022 Germany exported 5.5TWh and had to restart coal plants when the French nuclear plants were in trouble. So what? That what a grid is for.

H2 has been the alleged long term solution for decades while barely progressing at all. Even in aviation where it’s seemingly the only solution we have, it’s stagnating.

If you look at who is pushing H2, you will see that it’s mostly fossil fuel companies who want to prop up gas because as you rightfully pointed out "And gas plants are what is closed to H2 and can be switched over easiest."

> So what? That what a grid is for.

It’s going to be hard to reach net zero while burning coal and if the actual solution is importing nuclear energy from somewhere else while pretending it doesn’t happen, it would be simpler to just straight up go for nuclear.

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