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Comment by l5870uoo9y | Hacker News Reader

The absurdity of the climate debate is that “we” talk almost constantly about two energy sources (wind and solar) that in no way have the potential to provide the stable baseload power required to electrify society. And unless nature has blessed your country with abundant geothermal or hydroelectric power, that leaves you with the following options: oil, coal, or nuclear power.

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The addition of batteries as an intermittent power source brings us closer to 100% renewable energy and allows us to incrementally decommission dirty plants, such as coal- and oil-fired plants.

The design goal of adding a battery to grid power sources is to capture energy that would otherwise be lost when demand is lower than generation. In addition to capturing excess production of wind or solar-derived energy, one could capture unused energy from our current baseload generating plants overnight. We could also, this would also let us capture the energy that would otherwise be wasted by unnecessary nighttime lighting.

Denmark is linked to the Norwegian grid, which is essentially all hydropower [1]. It imports baseload when needed and exports cheap solar power when not.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Norway

Wind and solar can provide enough energy. You may be referring to their well-publicized variability. Energy storage can solve that.

The next phase in these conversations is usually to argue back and forth about whether energy storage is going to be good enough soon, or never will be, or already is. You're naive if you think your storage solution can handle the massive reserves required, unless you're not naive for technical reasons. Don't ask me, this part is always inconclusive.

Ok, I guess we'll never know then.

> You're naive if you think your storage solution can handle the massive reserves required

The Scandinavian grid which Denmark is part of has 120 TWh of storage capacity (hydro in Norway and Sweden) which is literally 4 months of electricity consumption.

Yes but (deja vu here) pumped hydro storage benefits from geography, so it's only a solution for Norway and Sweden and other bumpy places.

This thread was about Denmark, but obviously the solution will be different everywhere. Some places have suitable geography, others have more sun and milder winters where overbuild+batteries are easier, some have existing Nuclear that can be kept running affordably, maybe you even have politically stable neighbors where a HVDC grid can smooth out differences in weather, there are no generic answers.

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