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Comment by idiotsecant | Hacker News Reader

This is a 'lawyer-worded' headline. I am an enormous fan of renewables, I am an electrical engineer who designs control systems for renewables exclusively. My career depends on renewables.

Headlines like this do nobody any favors. The problem with renewables is that you cannot run a grid on renewables alone. Many days will have an abundant oversupply, like the day shown. Many days will not. Consumers are not tolerant of brownouts in the west. We need pump storage hydro, we need massive improvements to the transmission system, and we need battery storage plants (in that order).

Its fine to celebrate days of high renewable GW output, but people get out the GW Bush 'mission accomplished' banners a little early. The generation is the cheap and easy part. The rest is expensive and slow and needs way more focus than it's getting if we ever want to make progress in the west (China is already figuring it out)

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For those of us outside of Britain (i.e. 98% of us?) the message here isn't "mission accomplished" -- it's "Yes it's possible"

Well, in the sense that it's possible to be eating zero calories in the time between meals. You still need the meals. If you're just looking at brief snapshots, it doesn't tell you much.

It was a widely considered impossible to have more than single digit percentage of renewables even for instantaneous figures. That "limit" has been raised again and again as the world gets more experience with it.

It's great that we've made so much progress that people can say "it's just 90% renewable for 30 mins" but that's a result of decades of hard work.

You are conflating ideas here and it's getting muddled up. Literally nobody ever said that we couldn't handle 100% renewables for brief periods. The single digit percentage you're referring to is not about the renewables, it's about when the renewables aren't there. Its about maintaining grid stability when you don't have dispatchable sources to do it with. Essentially what we've built is a system where the renewables provide a tertiary function- providing power when they want to, but not in a reliable way, so we still have the same carbon based dispatchable resources.

This is not a serious system. We've done a bit of work on th cheap, easy part. Installing some solar panels is easy and costs almost nothing. The storage and transmission of power is 90% of the actual work!

It is literally written into regulations in many places that renewables aren't allowed to go above certain percentages even for short periods e.g in Ireland they are raising the cap by 5% every so often with an aim to get to 95% by 2035, it's currently 75% and was 50% when they brought in that particular rule.

In Australia they keep reducing the number of synchronous generators that are required to be connected as they gain more experience.

Renewables started as fringe tech and are now a trillion dollar industry. But they faced skepticsims at every stage along the way.

But it would still be an achievement worth sharing if, never in your life before, you thought you could go on a full day without eating, and then you go and do it, wouldn't it? And then you might argue back "oh but it's not an achievement to go a full day without eating" or "Anybody can do it". To which i say "Well that's the problem of the metaphor you made. It's still an achievement and a milestone that we could get to 90%+, even if just briefly.

Isn't pumped hydro severely limited by geography in many places?

I'm hoping for some other technology apart from pumped hydro or batteries to be used for capturing surplus renewable energy for later use. It's unfortunate that hydrogen seems to be too complex to handle at these scales, it'd be utopian if it wasn't and the excess of renewables could be transformed into hydrogen for use in turbines instead of nat gas...

> Isn't pumped hydro severely limited by geography in many places?

Scotland seems to be a perfect place for pumped storage. I see that UK has 4 pumped storage stations, 2 in Wales, 2 in Scotland. But Scotland being quite far from most of UK's population may not be ideal if we're talking about supporting the whole country with pumped storage. It would be like 600km to the south of England.

HVDC would work quite well for a 600km transmission line, I don't think it needs UHVDC lines for that kind of distance.

Why 600km exactly?

600km is roughly the distance from the hilly parts of Scotland to the south of England.

Yeah, the idea of people claiming that something on the Great Britain is too far and can't distribute power to something else on the Great Britain is laughable.

Next we'll have somebody from Lichtenstein saying the same about their country...

Well, I only said that if we're considering a ~fully renewable energy generation in the UK, with supply evened out by massive pumped storage projects, then locating all the storage in Scotland isn't ideal for the efficiency of the system. But yeah, I looked up the losses on HVDC lines, and it seems to be a non-issue (at least from a technical point of view). I also looked at a map of wind power[0] - seems concentrated on Scotland, so the distance from generation to potential storage would be quite short.

[0] https://globalenergymonitor.org/projects/global-wind-power-t...

There are several lined up for construction over the next 5-10yrs (eastern green link 1-5)

Iron air batteries sound promising

exactly, and they are cheap, right?

Pumped hydro needs a hill to pump up. That's why I said storage and transmission. We are laughably bad at moving power from where it is made (or stored) to where it is used and the worst part is it's not even a problem of science or engineering. We have it all figured out!

It's purely a problem of political will.

The headline is perfectly accurate… I’d say what you’re saying is a kind of whataboutism about stuff everybody knows…

Milestones like the one here are notable and interesting to most people!

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