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Comment by ndhbxyd | Hacker News Reader

It will happen when we have better weather forecasting models. If it gets randomly cloudy for 5 days this month and 17 days next months screws up planning for factories, farms, datacenters etc.

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I always post this https://www.rte-france.com/en/data-publications/eco2mix/powe...

France is notorious for being all-in on nuclear, which they then have to shut down in the summer because the river water they use for cooling gets too hot.

The French seem to have some cool ideas to solve pesky problems. Guillotine for the super rich, nuclear for energy. Though it looks like they stopped doing both.

Batteries, having a mixed grid of renewables, and new advances in nuclear solves this

Batteries help, but they still cost way more than direct solar and wind. We still need way more solar and wind to use directly.

Costing less than the most expensive thing they replace is the interesting threshold.

That's evening peaker gas plants in most places. After batteries push gas out of that market they go on to morning peaks and so on.

This is the exact scenario they are being used in at scale. The company removes their gas peaker plant infrastructure and replaces them with batteries. Already have the grid interconnect and now can dispatch power on the millisecond level instead of hour level.

A "peaker" or Open Cycle Gas Turbine is much less efficient which is doubly expensive in Europe. Firstly you need more fuel, and the fuel is expensive, but also you're making more pollution and that's expensive too.

The UK for example basically doesn't have "peakers". Right now it's early evening, demand is high as people cook evening meals but haven't yet retired to bed where they stop using electricity, but renewable generation is reduced as the sun approaches the horizon. So there's 8GW of combined cycle gas power plant production, but only about 100MW of "peakers" and it might grow to 200MW or so at absolute peak.

batteries are not yet competitive with fossil fuel

This is not true. Batteries are cheaper than peaker power plants using fossil fuel. They also allow the operator to fulfill market demands at the minute level versus the hours previously that it took to turn on a peaker plant.

This is being done at scale in California and Texas.

Fore more than 2 hours capacity, batteries are expensive than most other and cost keeps increasing as more hours of capacity needed. Without gas or coal to burn when 1hr battery capacity runs out, battery storage is expensive.

Are you saying that the cost/MWh of battery storage goes up the more batteries are installed?

It's simple power vs energy equations. Let's say you need to supply steady 1MW to town for 1hr, 2hr or 10hr. This needs total of 1MWh 2Mwh or 10Mwh respectively. Let's say battery would cost $200/kwh, then this would cost 200k, 400k or 2M resp. Battery storage is generally used for less than 2hr duration currently where they are price competitive. For the rest, either gas peaker, coal or hydro is used.

interesting, so most power in Texas at night comes from batteries?

To scale battery storage to a level that is capable of bridging, say, 48 hours of "Dunkelflaute" (darkness and no wind) on a regional scale (e.g. the entire Scandinavia) is probably unrealistic. Just the amount of lithium needed would be insane. And there were longer Dunkelflautes in recent history.

New advances in nuclear is what I hope for. First experimental SMRs are being installed in several places of the world, others are in design stage. Looks like a hopeful technology.

> To scale battery storage to a level that is capable of bridging, say, 48 hours of "Dunkelflaute" (darkness and no wind) on a regional scale (e.g. the entire Scandinavia) is probably unrealistic. Just the amount of lithium needed would be insane. And there were longer Dunkelflautes in recent history.

48 hours in Scandinavia is roughly equivalent to turning all their road vehicles electric. And that's even with Norway using the second highest per-capita rate of electricity in the world let alone Scandinavia (second to Iceland, whose electricity is 100% renewables thanks to abundant geothermal): https://www.statista.com/statistics/383633/worldwide-consump...

Given nobody is suggesting an instantaneous transition, this is not at all unrealistic, and I don't know why anyone might consider it to be.

Good luck with new nuclear, but with all the politics in that domain, I don't expect that to work out even if e.g. Helion Energy supplies working shipping-container-sized aneutronic fusion.

Across a large enough area it's always sunny somewhere. And clouds don't interfere as much as you'd think. Add in wind, hydro, nuclear and some gas and you can handle pretty much anything just fine.

you can handle it with solar & gas alone

That has nothing to do with where factories, mines, farms etc are already located. You have to buy land to connect the power plant to the load and some guy in the middle wont sell. Handle congestion/maintenance of those lines etc. Lots of issues beyond just generation that the grid already is dealung with even though massive solar plants have been built. But main thing is weather forecasting has to get better because even with existing huge plants constant surprises happen.

There's this thing called the power grid, it transports electricity across great distances.

And everything you're talking about is an issue with any kind of production, I don't know why you're bringing it up as if it's unique to solar. If you're building a factory that needs high amounts of stable power then you plan accordingly. Doesn't change the fact that solar is a useful way to generate electricity. I don't think anyone is saying we have to use it exclusively. We can use different solutions for different problems.

Lots of probs with existing grid . Certain routes are already overloaded/congested, building new ones is not as easy because of land acquisition costs compared to the past. Repairing, upgrading and maintaining old routes to handle new loads raises costs of moving electrons to your factory etc. One hurricane or blizzard can shut a route down so redundant routes have to be built. People just under estimate how complex things have become.

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