Comment by danaris | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danaris | Hacker News Reader

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You don't seem to understand how renewables actually work.

The idea that you need so many batteries to store enough energy to last the entire winter indicates that you don't comprehend how good solar panels are in 2026. (...Or 2006.)

The idea that renewables are unpredictable in anything remotely resembling the same way as a casino indicates you don't comprehend how renewables have ever worked.

It's true, we don't have 100% control over the output of renewables the way we do with fossil fuels*. But that doesn't mean they're unpredictable enough to cause meaningful problems for grid-scale renewable energy. And if you think that solar panels don't produce power during the winter, well, for one thing, you're going to have to explain to my parents just what was offsetting huge chunks of their energy bill the last several Upstate NY winters.

And...batteries are getting better and better. Give them a few years, and it won't be at all unreasonable to store a season's worth of energy, at least for a house, and probably for a town. (I have no idea if the way they scale makes it significantly harder to do that for larger areas and larger storage volumes.)

* If we have the fuel. And that's a large and growing "if".

I have 25 panels highly efficient panels on a small house. "Total overkill", even according to the installer who was happily taking my money. For two months in the summer I was generating 4x to 5x what I needed. To store that surplus I would fill five 9kwh batteries PER DAY. These aren't shitty lead-acid or NiCad, they're brand new LiFePo4, and are surprisingly compact. But using them to store two months of surplus would cost me half a million euros and take up most of my yard with 300 batteries.

The other question (a more important one) is how much stored power I would actually need for the winter. Which points to your comment "you don't comprehend how good solar panels are in 2026". Yes I absolutely do. My worst performing solar day recently was 5.85kwh on the 27th of August (a bad day, but not a short winter day). Two days in a row like that, and I'd be relying on some external "steady state" power source, like my old nuclear power plant at the end of the garden. (The very next day I generated 30kwh, but the whole point is that it's not economical for me store enough surplus for two consecutive shit days in August, never mind the whole winter).

I don't know what my November through to February average will be, or for much of the spring/autumn I'll be "averaging" a surplus. But I guess that maybe €300,000 of batteries in my up yard would hold enough surplus to get me through the winter months? The solar could certainly fill them. Solar isn't the problem.

I just can't imagine how this is supposed to scale.

Why do you keep saying need to store enough power for the whole winter? Unless you live in the arctic circle you're not going to get six months of darkness.

If you're generating 4x to 5x your required energy in summer you don't need to store that energy for whole winter. You can get away with generating 5x less energy and still have what you actually need each day.

When solar panels become cheaper than roof slates it's going to become a no brainer to over provision regardless of the ability to store it. I'm talking about a world where panels cost a 10th of what they do currently.

You can also still use the grid to pull base load from other sources such as nuclear, wind, geothermal, hydro or tidal power. It's not either or, they work together.

Relying on fossil fuels that have to be transported by ship at the whims of madmen is just stupid from a security point of view and that's before we even talk about what it's doing to the planet.

Trump has been running down his strategic fuel reserve since he came to power. That's before he started his latest war. At some point he's likely to stop exporting fuel as a consequence of that.

Fossil fuels are only going to get more expensive and the sooner we can stop burning them the better.

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