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Comment by pydry | Hacker News Reader

This is what the oil and nuclear industry propaganda says.

The reality is that solar and wind anticorrelate more than you think, demand shifting (e.g. charging the car when it's sunny) is easier than you think, batteries and pumped storage and power2gas are cheaper than you think and nuclear power is way, way, way, way more expensive than you think.

Weather based models with actual data say that in Australia you'd need 5 hours of storage to get to ~97% renewable: https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g...

In Europe or America you might need 7-8 while in carbon industry PR models (the same people who denied global warming) seem to think you need 300+.

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> solar and wind anticorrelate more than you think

They anticorrelate in some locations. In others, they don't. Here in Finland in the winter you get effectively zero sun. We also get persistent stationary anticyclones. That means potentially over a month of temps in the -30°C region, and zero wind.

Australia is extremely sunny. California is even better, they are modeling that assuming they keep their current hydro capacity, they only need to add ~3h in batteries. Hot places also do better than cold places, because the usage peaks track the sun.

> In Europe or America you might need 7-8 while in carbon industry PR models (the same people who denied global warming) seem to think you need 300+.

How on earth do you expect 7-8 to be enough? 300 isn't enough either. The real number for a fully renewable-based grid here is somewhere north of 2000.

Renewables are great in some situations. There are places in the world that should go for 100% renewables as quickly as possible. It also makes sense to locate a lot of the high-consuming industry in such places. But before you hawk your solution everywhere, you need to actually study the local conditions, and not try to extrapolate anything from Australia.

I think it also depends on other stuff. Spain gets bunch of sun even when there's the deepest winter in Finland but even if they are technically part of the same grid, the challenge is getting the energy there.

Spain and Finland are not part of the same grid. Spain is in the CESA, Finland is in the NSA.

Being part of the same grid doesn't matter so much as the amount of interconnection available. Finland has a higher proportion than Spain since France has stalled on building more interconnection capacity as this will likely reduce the amount they can sell their excess nuclear generation to Germany.

> How on earth do you expect 7-8 to be enough? 300 isn't enough either. The real number for a fully renewable-based grid here is somewhere north of 2000.

2.000 hours of storage would equate to 83 full days of electricity demand. That's on its face absurd. Most models assume that a "Dunkelflaute" (span of time with significantly reduced solar and wind output) will last at most 10 days. Add a few days as a safety margin. And that is all of Europe becalmed and dark, as the entire European electricity net is synchronized and transfer capacity between various regional grids is continuously expanded.

Power transmission is a thing. And where you can't lay down a transmission line, you can convert electricity into h2 or methane and put it on ships, just like we do with dino juice.

> Most models assume that a "Dunkelflaute" (span of time with significantly reduced solar and wind output) will last at most 10 days.

The longest recorded in Finland is 90 days. More than two weeks of it continuously happens nearly every winter.

> as the entire European electricity net is synchronized

It is not. The CESA is synchronized. The various peripheral areas are not part of it.

> Power transmission is a thing.

It is not a thing you can trust. We have only just gotten a very sharp reminder of that. We have a neighbor that likes to cut sea cables as a fun past-time activity.

> you can convert electricity into h2 or methane

I am very pro that, but this will take a very long time to build out.

> The longest recorded in Finland is 90 days.

Not trying to diss Finnland, but the country requires less than 1,000,000 Terrajoulehours of energy per year. That's like a few percent of Germany's usage. I'm sure Europe could cover you.

> It is not. The CESA is synchronized. The various peripheral areas are not part of it.

You are correct. But transmission lines do exist and synchronization would be possible. The baltic countries have done so in 2025 to get away from the Russian grid.

>> Power transmission is a thing. > It is not a thing you can trust.

You trust it now. My guess would be that most fossil fuels in Finnland are imported and that the country is already deeply dependent on cross-border electricity transmission (as basically every other country in Europe)?

For most countries, energy independence is no realistic option and never has been since serious expansion of industry. It's something you factor into hardening your infrastructure and Finnland can hedge against this with land-based transmission lines to Sweden and building out capacity for h2/methane imports.

> I am very pro that, but this will take a very long time to build out.

Longer than the presumed 20+ years to build even a single nuclear reactor?

It doesn’t take 20 years to build a nuclear power plant or Thorium reactor, which is coming online soon in China, it also doesn’t take that long to build high speed rail system either.

> You are correct. But transmission lines do exist and synchronization would be possible. The baltic countries have done so in 2025 to get away from the Russian grid.

There's no point in synchronizing the Nordics / Britain / Ireland with CESA grids since they are interconnected with HVDC rather than AC.

>They anticorrelate in some locations. In others, they don't. Here in Finland in the winter you get effectively zero sun.

Virtually nowhere gets zero sun.

Finland is also unusually blessed with tons and tons of hydropower potential which functions both as a battery as well as power generation.

As well as a very low population density.

It is also possibly the best advert for not using nuclear power ever given the disaster of recent projects (e.g. EDF cost overruns).

Everywhere gets zero sun at night.

And at high latitudes, the night can be very long. And even when the sun does appear for a bit, it doesn't provide a lot of energy.

And you might want to ask the Fins how they feel about nuclear power: around two thirds of the population are for it as well as pretty much the entire political establishment, including the Green Party.

> Finland is also unusually blessed with tons and tons of hydropower potential which functions both as a battery as well as power generation.

Where did you get that idea from? This isn't Norway; we don't have any mountains. The country is mostly flat and most of the suitable locations already have a hydropower plant since the 1970s.

I am very pessimistic about the economics of nuclear power but Finland is basically the best case scenario for it.

Last year, we had (depending on location) 0 to 25 hours of sunlight total in the entire month of December.

Low sun angle plus very heavy cloud cover means that even midday looks like a gloomy sunset.

Finland is the definition of an outlier, and folks in similar situations make up a tiny percentage of the world population. They can burn gas for the next 50 years, and we can still be good.

Finland is a cold country that needs cheap electricity for heating during winters. Burning gas isn't an option.

It isn't propaganda. No country gets 100% of its electricity from wind and solar 100% of the time for a reason.

In January 2025, solar generated 1.5TWh of electricity in Germany (in June it generated 10TWh): https://www.energy-charts.info/downloads/electricity_generat...

In January 2025, Germany burned about 236 TWh of fossil fuels.

You cannot even mostly replace fossil fuels with solar.

Germany will need a total of 1,867 TWh per year in 2030, so an average of 155 TWh/month.

fossil fuels are very inefficient when used in most applications (especially ICE and oil for heating). As countries use more and more electricity instead of fossil fuels to generate motion and heat, total energy demand will decrease accordingly.

Currently, Germany imports almost all of its fossil fuel from abroad. Mainly Norway, USA, Gulf countries, etc. Russia used to play an important role and we paid dearly for that. As we are for the reliance on the US, I guess.

We could actually bring our energy dependence closer to home and make it cheaper by substituting fossil fuel imports with solar + battery with the PV part being distributed across northern African countries. But most likely it will be more convenient (if less efficient) and politically desirable to create a mix of domestic and souther European sources, with specialized stuff like H2/Green NG imports from Iceland and other energy rich places being mixed in.

Also, Germany will (and does) a large share of it energy requirement not from solar, but from wind. Already, renewable energy has very much softened the effects of the Iran war on electricity prices. They never exceeded the highest levels of 2025, while fossil fuels jumped to levels last seen immediately after Russia's invasion of Ukraine and are still elevated over 2025 levels.

> we paid dearly for that

And if you had invested in Drake Landing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Landing_Solar_Community solar setup instead of PV, then neither the Russian invasion of Ukraine nor Hormuz blockade would have been a huge deal. The cost of energy is destroying your industrial base.

> Also, Germany will (and does) a large share of it energy requirement ... from wind

15TWh in January 2025. Again, you burned about 230 TWh of fossil fuels. Nearly every heating system is over 80%, electricity closer to 50%, so lets say 150TWh. Do you have an order of magnitude more land and water you're able to put wind generation on? And are you willing to base your life and economy on not having Dunkelflaute?

> Do you have an order of magnitude more land and water you're able to put wind generation on?

Actually yes. We currently use less than 0.5% of our agricultural land for PV (and some agricultural use is technically possible below PV). We could of course dedicate 5% or even 10% of land use to PV, if we really needed to (which we don't). We also could still expand PV to large swathes of build-up area (car parks and the like).

And Wind turbines actually don't need much space at all, the main issue is distance to settlements because of noise/shadow concerns.

> And are you willing to base your life and economy on not having Dunkelflaute?

I think there is an interesting discussion to be had. If we could i.e. half the cost of energy but have to live with drastically reducing energy consumption every few years for a couple of weeks in winter, would that be worth it?

We actually did so in the first winter after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, because energy prices rose dramatically and people and businesses reacted accordingly. That was painful (and had no upside whatsoever), but I think if it didn't come completely by surprise but would be a designed part of the system, it might be worth it.

> We also could still expand PV to large swathes of build-up area (car parks and the like).

That doesn't solve your problems in the slightest. You get less than half the return on investment for PV that most other countries in the world get, and does nothing for when your peak energy load is. Every dollar spent on PV requires another dollar on natural gas for the winter and locks you into fossil fuel dependency. Spend the money on something which gives you winter power!

> the main issue is distance to settlements because of noise/shadow concerns.

That's exactly what I mean. Where can you actually build it? And is that enough? And why spend a dime on solar until you've maximized wind?

> If we could i.e. half the cost of energy but have to live with drastically reducing energy consumption every few years for a couple of weeks in winter, would that be worth it?

See, exactly, that's the kind of national conversation you (and here in the USA) should be having. But we don't do that kind of thing any more. The politicians make money lying about the costs of things -- Gerhard Schröder being, I guess, a Russian stooge at best, a great example of downplaying the full costs.

> then neither the Russian invasion of Ukraine nor Hormuz blockade would have been a huge deal. The cost of energy is destroying your industrial base.

Domestic heating has little to do with industrial base. Fertilizer prices would still have risen. Grain supplies would still be affected.

> Domestic heating has little to do with industrial base.

It does because 1. they're both fighting for now-expensive imported natural gas 2. rates go up for everybody to pay for the malinvestment in solar

> Fertilizer prices would still have risen. Grain supplies would still be affected.

I meant "for Germany". Those are a problem for others.

Germany shouldn’t have dismantled those nuclear power plants dumb…

Just a couple years before the first invasion of Ukraine. Wouldn't it have been nice in 2022 when the Nordstream pipelines stopped?

AFAIK Germany got the majority of the fissile fuel from Russia..

First, you can trivially store years of nuclear fuel, which you can't with fossil fuels.

Maybe this is already complete, but at one point of lot of it was from decommissioning nuclear weapons, so it wasn't "we need them for fuel", it was "lets make use of this waste material and provide a financial disincentive for nuclear proliferation".

Finally, the West has plenty of sources for Uranium, and given plants already have years of fuel onsite, it is never a pressing problem.

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