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Comment by idiotsecant | Hacker News Reader

It's so frustrating discussing topics you know about on HN because you get so many software developers, which naturally know everything, that make comments like this.

Solar does not 'just work' - in the US it's a crisis in the making. Power prices in several areas of the grid routinely go negative because the grid is a zero sum game - there is very little storage so what goes in must exactly match what goes out or grid frequency deviations and eventually blackouts happen. This is much more likely to happen once undispatchable resources climb past a certain threshold in our generation mix.

To fix this we need massive storage and transmission investment, like moon landing and WW2 put together. We desperately need to do that before we add more non-dispatchable generation.

Solar with storage is an amazing resource. Without storage it's counterproductive if it's grid tied.

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> Solar with storage is an amazing resource. Without storage it's counterproductive if it's grid tied.

Solar creates the economic incentive for storage. Without solar coming first, storage cannot occur.

You can see this in California. In the beginning, it made sense to install only solar, because energy developers are compensated at the margin. Once the grid is saturated with solar, then the marginal economics changes in response to the duck curve, and storage starts to make economic sense.

If you block solar, you block storage. To believe otherwise is to be ignorant of the temporal aspect of the economics.

Huh? You don't need solar to build storage. Lots of generation sources become much, much better with storage. Storage is what you use to compensate for bad transmission, and we have plenty of bad transmission.

You really don't understand. There is likely some foundational gap in your understanding of microeconomics and marginal decision making. Put my initial reply into ChatGPT and ask it to spell it out.

> undispatchable resources

Solar is not dispatchable like a gas power plant is as the sun needs to shine to produce electricity. But it can very much be curtailed to any percentage you want. And that is being done globally every day exactly when it would be uneconomical to generate that electricity.

Interestingly this is as opposed to nuclear energy, which is basically never curtailed and always runs at 100% unless needed for maintenance or safety. Which is one of the main factors why nuclear energy is not economical anymore in a modern grid that values flexibility over constant generation.

Nuclear can be curtailed, it's just uneconomic to do so unless the price is literally close to zero or negative.

> Nuclear can be curtailed

I know, that's why I said it's basically never done. And it's usually not even done even if the price is zero or below, because a lot of nuclear power plants have fixed prices that are guaranteed by the government. Also, operating costs of nuclear power plants stay the same even if you curtail it 100%, so it's more economical to curtail something else.

But respectfully isn't the crisis more in the American political system and regulation? And surely large scale solar farms/batery storage connected to a supergrid (or whatever they are called) are a relatively good fit for this kind of legacy grid.

I mean..yes? Megaprojects are always political. But that's exactly the issue. No politician gets interest when they talk about building transmission towers and battery plants. They get fawning well meaning but inherently ignorant attention when they build renewable generation. The incentive is to support generation and avoid the politically less popular, more expensive, and ultimately much more important transmission and storage.

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