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Comment by friendzis | Hacker News Reader

> The only common sense I can think of is solar+storage

Even in Texas/California photovoltaic output in the winter is measly, anywhere more to the north and it's effectively inexistent. Solar+storage requires massive overprovisioning, to the level that it's cheaper to burn literal money.

Windmill farm outputs tend to dip during summer and peak over winter. With a given minimum power output windmills + photovoltaics + storage is massively cheaper per unit of yearly energy. Of course, if you value any semblance of network stability.

Solar+storage is clear path towards either guaranteeing reliance on fossils or brownouts. The smart energy meter you got that encourages running the washing machine during cheap hours will ensure that you voluntarily go dark during undersupply as the cost will skyrocket.

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> Even in Texas/California photovoltaic output in the winter is measly, anywhere more to the north and it's effectively inexistent.

The northernmost point in Texas would be at the extreme southern edge of Europe. The northernmost point of California is level with the sunny French Riviera. Hell, even frozen Minnesota has about the same solar potential as northern Spain...

If Europe can make solar work, so can the states (assuming a similar level of investment)

> If Europe can make solar work

Can you cite a region in Europe that physically independently covers its energy needs with solar+storage alone? </snark>

Stress on physical. Even if some regions claim renewables fully covering energy needs, that's at best on accounting level, those regions are still fully dependent on power import/export and simply could not function in an island mode for any extended period of time without at the very least brownouts. Quite importantly, it's always renewables, not solar.

The dispatchability problem is a real pain. Pool together wind + solar + hydro and the variability in power (!) output drops to levels possible to tame with realistic grid-scale storage sizes.

I am not talking about intra-day balancing here. It's the yearly cycle that comes to bite you. In my corner of Europe, if I wanted to go completely off-grid with solar+storage I would need storage well into the mid single-digit MEGA watt-hours, for the house needs (HVAC and DHW taking the lion's share) alone. That's laughably unrealistic.

> The northernmost point of California is level with the sunny French Riviera. Hell, even frozen Minnesota has about the same solar potential as northern Spain...

Yes, the southern states could probably make do with something like 3-4x overprovisioning, but that's still massive. So massive that any sort of windmill capability will outcompete any sort of COTS storage.

In my corner of Europe, I have vacationed in a house that’s completely off-grid with solar and a bit over 20 kWh of storage (it does use about half a ton of wood pellets for heating during the coldest months of winter). Link in Czech: https://www.csdum.cz/jak-jsme-postavili-cesky-sobestacny-dum...

I wonder how it would fare with just 100 kWh of storage, something you can still easily put together.

> Pool together wind + solar + hydro

Plus stored power, plus biomass, plus nuclear, plus gas.

90% renewables is better than 80% renewables. Throwing up our hands and saying "we'll never reach 100%, lets pack the whole thing in" isn't a sensible approach.

> Can you cite a region in Europe that physically independently covers its energy needs with solar+storage alone?

That is substantially moving the goalposts - nowhere in the world has built out sufficient solar to make that claim yet. The question is whether they can get there.

If you look at the table[1] for installed solar per capita, 9 of the top 10 countries are in Europe (the odd one out is Australia), so they are definitely giving it the old college try

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

My rooftop solar disagrees. It generates my whole house load in the winter, spring and summer I run a pretty healthy surplus.

Thats with all my appliances being electric and superfluous crap running like a 24/7 file server running. Because my power is so cheap I don't have any problems running that kind of stuff.

> Even in Texas/California photovoltaic output in the winter is measly, anywhere more to the north and it's effectively inexistent. Solar+storage requires massive overprovisioning, to the level that it's cheaper to burn literal money.

Citation needed

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