Comment by MakersF | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MakersF | Hacker News Reader

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It's unfair you're being down voted, you're right. I used to think that we could get by with just solar wind and batteries, but then after collaborating with people on an ideal energy mix the numbers were obvious: there is a (small) fraction that cannot be covered. Not with storage (the discharge cycles are so few that the cost is prohibitive. How can a battery pay for itself with 10-20 discharges a year? And this applies to any kind of battery that needs to be built, including hydro). Likely there will need to be some baseload nuclear (which then increases average prices, since to make it economical you need to buy all the electricity it produces, and so it partially displaces renewables). The alternative is overbuilding solar+wind+battery something like 5/8 times the average need. Maybe if the prices drop enough that could be feasible.. The big win would be if there is some way to get predictable power at a lower cost than nuclear (e.g. tidal), which could be used to smooth the troughts, or alternatively a low capex but potentially high opex solution which is turned on only when needed (gas is an option, but not co2 free. And sizing the power needed is not super cheap, although now it's not a problem since we have enough gas capacity which is going to be displaced, so it won't be needed to be built)

Yeah but we are nowhere near the end of the scaling curve. For now, we can use the natgas plants during the unexpected outages while solving for green hydrogen / whatever backup plants. Like when a household has one EV and one gas car, they can always just take the gas car when they have range anxiety and don't know about chargers. NBD.

Falling back on gas 10-20 times per year sounds very reasonable.

It's not net zero, but nearly zero will probably do fine?

Politicians like to say net zero, but when we are 90% there will we maybe not stop caring and find other more pressing problems?

Net zero is barely enough to help with climate goals, given how late we are. It's not a huge goal, it is the absolute bare minimum to avoid >2 degrees of warming.

Achievable near-future net-nearly-zero in the near future is a lot better than waiting longer until we can achieve full net zero. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

The real issue is the cost of keeping gas peaker stations around that are mostly idle and fire up only a few days a year, but that's an economic issue, not an engineering one.

In the longer term, you could even run them off net-zero renewable syngas that you make the rest of the year using low-cost electrical power at peak solar generation times; you only need to store a relatively small amount of it, and old fossil fuel reservoirs are ideal for this.

Also once we're nearly-net zero, we should focus on airlines, shipping, industry, etc. not the last 5% of electricity.

> Likely there will need to be some baseload nuclear

Baseload nuclear is entirely feckless as a backup for a renewable grid. You either go with a long term storage technology (and then don't need nuclear), or you go to an entirely nuclear grid. Wind/solar and nuclear don't mix well.

Forget tidal, it’s dead in the water.

Everyone who’s tried it suddenly realises that anything you put in the ocean is almost immediately covered in marine growth, or destroyed by the ocean itself.

And that wave / tidal energy is very diffuse, or that where it isn’t diffuse it’s also extremely destructive.

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