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Comment by swader999 | Hacker News Reader

It'll be interesting if the sodium ion battery hype can combine with solar and give real base power alternatives. I think claims of cheapest don't really count unless it's qualified as non base power.

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The problem with the idea of "base power" is that in the past, the cheapest electricity was from the big thermal generators that take a day to warm up, and operate most cheaply by pumping out at maximum efficiency 24 hours a day. You could then layer on the more expensive electricity sources that could spin up in 15 minutes or a few hours, and match the demand curve, as long as you matched baseload generators to the minimum of the demand curve, and have a cost-optimal electricity mix.

Now that we have cheaper sources of energy for parts of the day, "base" power is a much less desirable concept. It's gone from a simple and straightforward optimization problem that a middle-schooler could solve to a cost optimization problem that markets and linear solvers can solve.

Now that we have cheap storage, and solar-plus-storage is cheaper than coal in the UK, the cost optimization is getting simpler: get rid of all the base load coal!

Didn't the last coal power plant in the UK close last year?

Yes, but no GB nukes load-follow either, so the same issue.

Economy 7 off-peak rate was invented to soak up some nuke power unused by industry in the night, IIRC.

"Cannot turn off" power can be as tricky to manage as "cannot turn on", and caused some difficulty for the GB grid operator during covid...

As you say, base power is just a concept. It is not a thing that exists in the real world. It's also a bad concept. Electricity demand and supply can be modelled statistically for a significantly better understanding than can be compressed into a single term like "base load". But that doesn't admit for very good rhetoric on internet forums.

24hrs solar is already a thing that is possible for large parts of the world with lithium batteries.

https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...

That study is already old as the prices for batteries have come down a lot more since then.

Base power isn't really all that important for solar, because its already covered by nuclear/other.

Getting "18" hours of power, thats actually important (https://timera-energy.com/blog/iberian-price-divergence-on-i...) if you can cover the evening peak, then most of your energy costs disappear.

yeah but not every country is france with ton of nuclear, in many it's still coal covering for those

Define "real base power"? You think the grid can only operate if every generator is always-on? How do you square that with the fact that the grid is operating just fine with this stuff already?

This is a fallacy, basically. Not least because electricity is by far the most mobile traded commodity in human history. Not enough sun today where you live? Buy your power from across the continent, where they have plenty. Or from your wind generators which are working fine. Or the wind generators across the continent if you have to. Or crank up the hydro dams (most of which rarely run at 100%) a bit to handle the shortfall. Or even fire up an idle gas plant if you absolutely can't get anything else.

The idea that solar and wind aren't (sigh) "real" is a lie that someone sold you. The real world relies on a lot of this stuff already and the promised apocalypse never arrived. Go figure.

> Or the wind generators across the continent if you have to.

Transmission losses are typically very substantial in most grids that are AC based. For example, a cross-country power transmission with the USAs grid would result in ~36% losses (napkin math at about 20% loss per 1000km).

Reality isn't as simple as "ship the electricity" unfortunately; it makes a lot of sense to keep generation near consumption.

Edit: Since people like this comment, take a look at this: https://patternenergy.com/projects/southern-spirit-transmiss...

Clearly something we'll need to get over. HVDC has something like 3% per 1000 KM loss - and when we start generating massive quantities of solar, 3% is going to be pretty acceptable.

You're talking about roughly ~5T (the prior estimates I'm aware of) in costs for replacing the grid with a HVDC transmission line. That's a massive cost and undertaking. It's much more likely we see an incremental transition to point-to-point transmission in major industrial corridors (Los Angeles/Irvine to IE solar generation capacity in the future, Lousiana Basin, North Texas to the gulf, etc.) where major benefits can be cost effectively be realized.

A "full" transition is unlikely in our lifetimes due to the fact that the majority of the benefits can be reaped without needing such an expense.

I never suggested replacing the entire network with HVDC. Point to point is exactly what I'd have recommended also.

I mean this already exists on the west coast.

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

No reason we cant start expanding things like this to the east and west.

They also have limits on how much power they can transfer before the lines sag too much.

Here in Norway the limitations of our rather poorly connected energy grid has become very apparent last few years, with 100x price difference between regions that aren't that far apart physically.

While we've been paying "winter prices" during summer, up north they've shut down hydro plants since the prices there are so low it's less than operating costs.

> They also have limits on how much power they can transfer before the lines sag too much.

That can be helped by reconductoring.

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/reconductoring-power-lines-...

I looked at tomorrow's (8th of October 2025) prices in Norway and Sweden. Northern Norway drops down to (negative!) -15 €/MWh at 17:45 while southern Sweden peaks at 190 €/MWh at the same time. So that's that for buying "from across the continent", let alone from your neighbors or even your own small country. I'm not sure that even the suggested reconductoring would help that much.

To answer ajross: I'm quite sure that the shutdown of Ringhals and Barsebäck in southern Sweden has had a much greater impact on their and likely southern Norway's prices as well than building for example 10 times the equivalent solar capacity in Spain. It is not even about losses, but just the grid capacity. Theoretically the prices in Nord Pool (from southern France and western Ireland to northern Norway and eastern Baltics) should be equal. As pointed out, in practice they vary wildly. And in principle it can get even worse. It would not be too unrealistic to have negative prices in northern Norway and rolling blackouts in southern Sweden at the same time. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader how the latter can even happen when Sweden has enough capacity to meet its power demand at that time.

Where does your 20% for 1000km come from? Transmission losses for long distance lines are much lower, e.g. the below is from wikipedia:

> Depending on voltage level and construction details, HVDC transmission losses are quoted at 3.5% per 1,000 km (620 mi), about 50% less than AC (6.7%) lines at the same voltage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current

The US is currently an AC grid. HVDC is not currently in any meaningful use in North America (yet)

That may be true but the number quoted there is 6.7%/1000 km for AC which is very far from 20%/1000km.

And now some people will have read his comment but not yours, and this will be anti-renewable energy propaganda forever.

There is a large HVDC corridor up the west coast, but I dont know of anything else.

>or example, a cross-country power transmission with the USAs grid would result in ~36% losses (napkin math at about 20% loss per 1000km).

wait, is that it? I can get my electricity from a solar panel in Nevada, middle of winter, far longer than I have local sunlight for,

for about 40 cents a kwh?

And that's treated as an existential problem?

Solar panels are so cheap we should be extremely overprovisioning anyway.

> for about 40 cents a kwh?

That’s fucking expensive if you don’t live in Germany or California! I pay a little less than a third of that for nuclear power.

> And that's treated as an existential problem?

Yes, tripling one’s electric bill is a problem.

It is, but hopefully you could do the math and see my current electricity price is like 30 cents a kwh (generation and delivery), primarily because our state has not built out any generation infrastructure in a long long while. Not "triple" my electric bill.

Likely, being able to buy from a generator across the country would REDUCE our prices. Allowing a solar farm in Nevada to compete in markets all over the country would be a large benefit to states like Maine.

Most people are not as far from the western deserts as Maine is, so they would see smaller losses. Add to that, as others have pointed out, a HVDC line is much better than 30% loss to get from Nevada to Maine.

So all this whinging is dumb. Lets build giant solar farms in Nevada deserts and ship it all across the country. Remember, I can't have local solar power past 4pm in January. This capability would replace wind or gas power

The financial fact is that solar is cheap enough that de-rating all panels by 30% to support such a "cross country grid" would be inconsequential. It's the equivalent to buying solar panels from a couple years in the past.

We should be building 2x what we "need" anyway.

The transmission/distribution loss in the US, summed over the whole grid, is about 6%.

> How do you square that with the fact that the grid is operating just fine with this stuff already?

Simple every grid in the united states has enough reliable generation capacity to take up the slack when solar fails. But that means the cost of building all those natural gas peaker plants is part of the cost of solar (it's never included in the LCOE).

This is what we're hoping battery-style plants will supplant. I say "battery-style" because it turns out that filling a tank with compressed air, lifting a heavy weight with a crane, or pumping water up into a lake all have excellent energy storage potential while not requiring any kind of esoteric matter or construction techniques. It does remain to be seen if such activities can be profitable or not - but if you're effectively buying power when it's cheap / free / paid to take it, and you're selling it when it isn't, it should be possible....

The only large scale energy storage system im aware of that is also cost effective is pumped hydro.

However pumped hydro is shall we say extremely environmentally bad.

Like casually remove a mountain bad

Norway disagrees, it depends on your environment

I suppose it depends where you're doing it. Makes most sense to do these things where natural formations do 99% of the construction and you just build a dam. Honestly, we probably need to do a lot more damming to keep more fresh water in - we lose so much of it to the ocean where it becomes useless salt trash...

Virtually all the practical and politically acceptable locations for dams already have one.

At least in western countries. There's lots of potential in developing countries.

What's the environmental downside of off-river pumped hydro?

To scale it up requires building very large impoundments of water, typically on the top of a mountain by removing the top of the mountain.

Think artificial volcano shape with a tube in the middle.

The reservoirs need not be that large, at least for diurnal storage. Look at the illustration for this 1000 MW, 8 hour project:

https://www.whitepinepumpedstorage.com/

For solar the storage really need to be seasonal.

Think 100 million times the size of that project.

24/8 * 100days * 330000Mw

Pumped hydro is not appropriate for seasonal storage. It's not an environmental issue, it's a capital cost issue. The capex per kWh of storage capacity is two orders of magnitude too high. See the comparison tables at https://www.orcasciences.com/articles/standard-thermal-copy

Well yes, but nothing is appropriate.

That's why we still burn natural gas all winter instead of storing solar.

Renewables-hydrolysed hydrogen stored in the caverns where we currently store methane is quite likely a big part of the interseasonal energy solution.

Or indeed methane generated via the Sabatier reaction using hydrogen generated from renewables - higher energy density, easier to handle, store and distribute. And it can be fed to existing gas peaker plants, a known technology.

Indeed possible and both will probably happen.

If you put your H2 hydrolysers and turbines or fuel cells near the H2 store then handlng and distribution becomes easier. Move the electricity not the H2.

The problem is where do you get the CO2. This adds complexity and cost and looks to make the economics inferior to just storing hydrogen.

I had thought that, until the technology in that link above came out. Ultra cheap thermal storage in dirt, if it works, looks much superior to hydrogen for seasonal grid storage, and has no geographical constraints. Hydrogen really wants salt formations to make cheap solution mined cavities; piles of dirt can be made just about anywhere.

Storing heat in dirt will only work if it's combined with low grade heart distribution networks.

In general though low grade heat is almost entirely worthless, all the Bitcoin miners and data centers that regularly just blow low grade heat into the air.

What? No. Here we're talking about storage of heat in dirt to be recovered as electrical energy using a steam cycle. This only requires moving the high grade (600 C) heat to the power plant itself. There is no need to move low grade heat, except the waste heat from this power plant.

That makes a really interesting case for large-scale thermal storage at high temperatures (inefficient, cheap, enormous capacity, slow response) as a complement to solar generation (cheap, intermittent), and batteries (efficient, instant response, not enough capacity).

It could be a game changer. They've been coy about what their resistive heaters are made out of, but this is looking like something that could be done anywhere in the world without high tech. If it works it could expand explosively (figuratively :)).

It also is a counter to anyone still proposing primary baseload plant construction. Why fission atoms when you can just get cheap heat from huge piles of slightly red hot dirt?

Lifting heavy weights with a crane (or up a hill with a train) is unfortunately a very expensive way to store energy compared with pumped-storage hydroelectricity, which does effectively the same thing but with far lower cost and greater scalability.

This can be seen from the fact that while lifted weight storage is ridiculously easy to build with existing technology - it's a train or a crane, after all! - it has never caught on as an economically fieldable system, whereas pumped-storage hydro has wide adoption.

> But that means the cost of building all those natural gas peaker plants is part of the cost of solar (it's never included in the LCOE).

This is a weird position to take. How would you price out nuclear then? As that cannot respond to changes in demand quickly either? Should every power source's cost have some gas tacked on to it? Or can we just assume that for now we have a mix of sources where different sources have different pros and cons.

And as said in many other places here, fossils don't have their externalities priced in either. I wouldn't be surprised if future generations scold us for burning so much natural gas that can also be used for many other things than burning

Not the GP, but I think it's fairly reasonable, yes.

Ultimately, what we care about, from a grid policy perspective, is the cost to provide 99% (or whatever) guaranteed 24/7/365 power. Each energy source will have its own challenges in order to do that, and for solar availablity it clearly one of them. And yes, externalities should be factored in.

> Or can we just assume that for now we have a mix of sources where different sources have different pros and cons.

Of course, but the question is: what is the right mix for the right place. And saying "solar + storage" is cheaper than gas means very different things if it can only guarantee 60% availability like in England, or 95+% in the sunniest regions of the world.

The figures reported here come from (among others) Lazard' LCOE analysis. (https://www.lazard.com/media/xemfey0k/lazards-lcoeplus-june-...) If you have a look at how it's calculated, "solar + storage" only has enough storage for 4h for instance. You cannot really meaningfully compare it directly with nuclear which is much more reliable in itself.

What LCOE says is that the system will produce X amount of energy at cost of Y. It says nothing about when that energy will be produced. An energy source that produces 365 MWh on January 1st only, and another that produces 1 MWh every day, for the same cost, will have the same LCOE. The latter is, provided you can scale it, much more useful in practice.

Look, I'm not saying that solar is bad or we shouldn't do it. It's just that the "solar is cheap" thing which is regularly reported is a bit misleading. We've heard it for years now, and yet electricity prices around the world are mostly increasing. Clearly there's a mismatch, but where does it come from? And I think part of the reason is that the "ancillary" costs of solar have been underestimated. Sure, the energy straight out of the panel is very cheap, but if you need 10s of billions in grid upgrades and storage/backup to make it work in practice, then it should definitely be included in the comparison! Just like the externalities of fossil fuels should be.

> yet electricity prices around the world are mostly increasing

Part of that is a result of not pricing in externalities so we've never paid the actual cost. On the other hand, demand is going up a lot which means a lot more investment on the grid side as well.

If you have a level 2 charger for your ev for example, that can draw 20kW... If you asked an electrician in the 80s what the peak power a residential home could consume is, you would probably get 1 maybe 2kW at best. So all of that infra is very undersized if we stop burning stuff.

And finally, recently there's been a few disruptions in main sources of fossil fuels (looking at you, Russia)

> (it's never included in the LCOE).

Right, because that would change the definition of LCOE. And you are right that it's important, and there are other terms to look for, as LACE, which EIA has been putting out for a long time. And Lazard's energy reports:

https://www.lazard.com/news-announcements/lazard-releases-20...

have an entire section on "Cost of firming intermittency" where it estimates costs based on each region of the US.

Thank you for this link.

This is the first time I've seen serious discussion about "firming intermittent" power sources.

I'm not sure I agree with the numbers from the various ISOs but it's still an excellent starting point.

One thing that could help would be to see more folks who are bullish on solar actually push the new promise that it gives: not just that we'll have clean energy (yay, but abstract) - we'll have cheap energy, if we do it right. Tons and tons of it for so cheap that you'll almost not even have to think about it, especially in comparison to fossil fuels today. Every aspect of the supply chain is simpler and cleaner.

If people could see that at some point, keeping their house at a perfect temperature with an electric heat pump would lead to them _never thinking about a heating bill again_... that would be far more concrete than promises of staving off climate change.

Probably not orders of magnitude cheaper than today. But energy prices will become very stable.

A Spanish bank has calculated that the solar and wind built there between 2019 and 2024 reduced wholesale electricity prices by 40% compared with if they'd stuck at 2019 levels.

They project a further 50% drop by 2030:

https://www.bde.es/wbe/en/publicaciones/analisis-economico-i...

> we'll have cheap energy, if we do it right.

Well by all means, show us how to do it right at scale. The leaders in this area (California, European countries) haven’t exactly done much to deliver on the promise of cheap renewable energy.

Iirc, Texas has deployed more clean energy generation in the last few years than the entire CA fleet, despite CA subsidizing heavily, and retail energy rates >2x in CA. TX is at something like 3x the generation from wind/solar in CA. My understanding is that this is largely because of how much easier it is to deploy in Texas than in almost any other part of the country.

That’s how you do it right. You set some basic rules, and then otherwise get out of the way and let economics do its thing, and stop trying to master plan and control everything. So many of the existing regs are built around huge centralized generation sources, requiring extensive planning and approvals, rather than small distributed sources.

I'm guessing most of this is in the form of wind energy. The number of large wind farms that have popped up across the state is pretty crazy.

Yep, that's the majority, and western TX is supposedly super windy, so not replicable everywhere. But they're deploying lots of solar, too.

Not every generator needs to be always on, but the generation needs to be relatively independent of external conditions, especially when there might be correlation between high usage at disadvantageous external conditions (for example it’s colder and less sun in winter).

Recognizing this does not mean one is hostile to renewables, even though some people that are hostile use this talking point dishonestly.

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