I get a little frustrated that all of the people who crapped all over solar power can now simply sit there quietly as it becomes a major component of electricity generation and pay no price for spreading anti-solar propaganda at such a historically critical juncture. I always found it particularly grotesque coming from the HN crowd, where an audience of mostly engineers and entrepreneurs seemed to have no problem finding impossible problems that could never be solved and would therefore render solar useless on a large scale. That profound lack of imagination could almost lead one to conclude that the naysayers had other axes to grind, and maybe it wasn't purely about clearing technical hurdles.
If the past trend in climate change denial is any guide, they'll just continue to crap on it, even as they are repeatedly proved dramatically wrong.
Though some recent attempts to pivot to "we aren't rolling out renewables fast enough because of environmentalists" suggest a few rats jumping from the sinking ship as reality bites hard.
Having been somewhat active in my uni days in „environmentalists“ orgs (eg Greenpeace), I think being blamed by everybody is part of the game as an activist. The reward is knowing that one has had an impact in pushing the needle a tiny bit.
And now it slowly emerges that the decades of activism have started to pay off now that we see more amd more stats about surging PV/Wind deployment and them providing already significant chunks of electricity needs in Europe (where I‘m from) and globally.
> I always found it particularly grotesque coming from the HN crowd, where an audience of mostly engineers and entrepreneurs seemed to have no problem finding impossible problems that could never be solved and would therefore render solar useless on a large scale.
I guess your lesson here is that most people who call themselves engineers aren't by any meaningful definition. Don't expect individual creativity from a business title that usually amounts to very little creative problem solving.
Yeah. Maybe the engineers of yore (but there are some thorny stories from some SV engineers in the 70's), when to build something you really needed solid technical knowledge
But nowadays whoever knows how to put together a basic webpage in ~~PHP~~ React calls themselves an "engineer" and begins having grandiose ideas
No wonder they got bamboozled by Theranos, uBeam, etc
I have at times tried to explain realistic visions of what it takes for renewables to become, say, 75% of the grid and people have taken it as crapping on solar, because I describe how it will require trillion dollar scale storage solutions.
But fossil fuels also require trillion dollar scale extraction solutions, so I don't see it as crapping on solar, it won't be easy but we will do it, I hope!
Right, but we don't yet see this projects happening, and it might be time that they start happening. But how to talk people into that, when half of the USA thinks climate change is a liberal scam, I don't know.
How can you accurately project costs of grid-scale store 1 or 2 decades into the future? It is an industry that is just starting out and projected to grow quite large. Profits and manufacturing labor account for greater than 50% of the battery costs now, so there is a good bit of room for prices to fall as manufacturing ramps up and the market becomes more competitive.
Well, the salt formation in Delta, UT can store enough hydrogen for something like 30 hours of the average US electrical power consumption. IIRC, creating those ~100 storage caverns would cost in neighborhood of $10 B.
You can't, it was an order of magnitude napkin math calculation I did based on the cost of pump back hydro dams in china and the amount of energy storage you would need.
It is going to be in the trillions barring some radical revolution in storage that is unlikely given our breadth of knowledge of physics at this point. A lot of people think that Tesla Megapacks here and there are enough but those cover interruptions on the scale of minutes, not hours or days.
Civilian nuclear power help share costs with the nuclear military industrial complex (e.g. Russia, France, UK, USA) and it's useful for countries that have a clear and pressing desire to be able to develop a nuclear bomb in a hurry (Sweden, South Korea, Japan), but without those caveats there isn't much point to it which is why nobody else builds it.
Its LCOE is 5x that of solar and between 1.5x-3x more expensive than solar/wind paired with just about all viable forms of green large scale storage (hydrogen, batteries, pumped storage (studies prove that unlike the river dams it is often confused with, geography for pumped storage is plentiful)).
Meanwhile tariffs like https://octopus.energy/agile/ reduces the need for that storage for easily shiftable demand sources like heaters/electric car batteries [edit in response to coldpie].
Pairing it with non-green gas is cheaper still, even in spite of the war. If up-front cost is your only concern, gas+solar+wind wins on all fronts.
It also takes ~20 years to build a nuclear plant, while new solar capacity can start taking meaty chunks out of current gas usage after 12 months. Given that western countries are between 40-60% gas powered these days and we don't have 20 years to avoid climate catastrophe, it leaves only two obvious choices of power source to decarbonize quickly - solar + wind.
> but without those caveats there isn't much point to it which is why nobody else builds it.
Having power and not freezing to death when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow is a pretty solid point.
We just put a new nuclear power plant into service in Finland.
> Its LCOE is 5x that of solar and between 1.5x-3x more expensive than solar/wind paired with just about all viable forms of green large scale storage (hydrogen, batteries, pumped storage).
Do you have any sources to back up these figures? I’m genuinely interested.
How is hydrogen a viable storage form when you cannot burn 100% hydrogen and fuel cell aren’t available or cost effective at utility scale?
How are batteries a viable storage form when there isn’t enough global manufacturing capacity to store energy at scale?
How is pumped hydro a viable storage form when you are limited by geography and can’t really build any more?
>Having power and not freezing to death when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow is a pretty solid point.
Not really. Electricity usage is not actually constant and nuclear power doesn't do load following unless you double the cost again (10x solar's LCOE).
Theres a reason only France tried that - and that is strongly related to the reason why Areva went spectacularly bankrupt.
Theres no reality in which it makes any economic sense except #1 providing military support or #2 a pretend reality where all available storage options are economically infeasible.
I have to say that an ignorant #2 is a pretty anti-climate position to take.
Oh, really? What's your solution to producing non-polluting power when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow?
> Electricity usage is not actually constant and nuclear power doesn't do load following unless you double the cost again
Can you explain how you've come to this conclusion?
We recently turned up a new nuclear power plant in Finland and they did nothing but turn up and down the generation levels when doing tests. Looking at the graphs, I can see output has varied between 3,3 and 4,3 GW this week.
The local wikipedia article on nuclear power states that power output can be regulated 5%/min, which is faster than almost all other generation methods.
> Theres a reason only France tried that - strongly related to the reason why Areva went spectacularly bankrupt.
Are you saying that Areva went over budget because they build us a load following nuclear plant?
> Theres no reality in which it makes any economic sense except #1 providing military support or #2 a pretend reality where all available storage options dont work.
Pray do tell what those available storage options are. Give us the real skinny then, none of that FUDD.
In fairness, in a renewably powered world Finland is going to be a really bad place to be. It's one of the worst places for energy (I'd call it the energy butthole of that world but I'll reserve that label for Russia). Solar is seasonal and wind is relatively sparse there.
What this means is you're going to lose your heavy energy intensive industry. Going with nuclear won't save you from that, if you're then competing with industry in places where solar is available all year at costs likely to be below $0.01/kWh.
> paired with just about all viable forms of green large scale storage (hydrogen, batteries, pumped storage).
I'm skeptical that these can actually scale to the required level to provide baseload when renewables are unavailable. Don't forget to include EVs and electric heating, which we don't have in massive quantities today but will need to have in short order.
(To be ultra-clear: I would never argue against more renewable deployments. Yes, more renewables, always more. But I think not building nuclear, right now, is a big mistake.)
Because they've never been deployed at the scale we're talking about. They're unproven. Hydrogen is inefficient to make and hard to store safely; current battery tech isn't efficient enough and has resource limitations; pumped hydro requires certain relatively rare combinations of geographic properties. Are those solvable problems? Probably, hopefully, some day. Meanwhile, nuclear works right now and is well understood.
Those are vague, nebulous, handwavy arguments. Some (like the inefficiency of hydrogen) are dog whistles that fall apart on close examination of the applications for which hydrogen would be suitable. The geography for OFF RIVER pumped hydro is not rare at all; it's present basically anywhere there is sufficient vertical relief (feasible even in deserts), in enormous amounts.
The generic problem with "it can't be done" arguments is you are claiming all possible ways of solving a problem don't work. This is a very strong claim, and is not backed up by such vague arguments.
Woah, ease up, friend! We're on the same side! I agree these storage solutions are all worth investing in. They're going to be great solutions for many areas. I just think nuclear is a great and proven solution for many areas too. I absolutely don't think "it can't be done," I just think we should hedge our bets a bit and rely on the fantastic, proven solution we already have, in case the other solutions don't pan out.
Nuclear is not a great and proven solution. It's a terrible solution, because it costs too much. All sorts of terrible solutions are available if we discard cost consideration. Cost is an inescapable part of engineering.
Nuclear has the disadvantage that they've been trying for longer than either of us have been alive to make it cheap, and it hasn't worked. This real world evidence can't be easily dismissed, especially when competing technologies have crashed in cost by orders of magnitude over that time.
Note that my position here would be revised completely if nuclear were, unexpectedly, to become much cheaper. But at this point I can't take mere promises of cost reduction as anything other than sales talk of that kind that has proven false too many times in the past, too many times to accept the facile excuses that it's always someone else's fault.
> It's a terrible solution, because it costs too much.
That's a reasonable position, and I think reasonable people can disagree here. I disagree for two reasons:
1) I think (could be wrong) the cost is largely regulatory. I suspect (could be wrong) that we could streamline that without sacrificing real safety and dramatically lower the cost.
2) Even still, the cost is absolute peanuts compared to the cost of climate change. Even the famous $30B Georgia plant cost less than the world's richest individual spent so he could smash a social media network against the wall like a toddler with a Tonka truck. The US Military gets about 100 of those plants in funding every single year. It's really not that much money in the grand scheme of things, when you're talking hundreds of trillions of dollars in damage about to smash us in the face. IMO we need to stop counting pennies here and really actually tackle this problem.
But yes, absolutely agreed it is relatively expensive compared to other solutions, and it should be a priority to get that cost down. I just don't think it's so expensive that it's disqualifying. And, again, I think reasonable people can disagree here.
(1) there is an often heard argument, or at least excuse, but it has problems. First, the cost problem is pretty much universal. Nuclear has stalled out everywhere (even in China it's experiencing cost problems and is underachieving). This suggests issues that go beyond local regulatory burdens. Second, what's the alternative? Just trusting the builders/operators to be good boys? That won't work. Appointing Philosopher King Regulators who can tell ahead of time just what regulations are actually necessary? How can they do that?
I will agree that one particular regulatory framework in the US could use serious rework or even revocation: NEPA, the law that requires laborious environmental impact statements. It's sand in the gears for dubious benefit for not just nuclear but all sorts of efforts. The big regulatory lawsuit that hit nuclear back in the 1970s involved NEPA (the "Calvert Cliffs Decision").
(2)'s first sentence would be a valid argument if the choice were between nuclear and climate change. But that's not the choice being made. That nuclear is better than climate change is damning with faint praise, the "it's better than a poke in the eye" of energy arguments.
As for naval reactors... putting a nuclear reactor in a ship increases the overall cost of building and operating that ship, compared to burning oil. And this is true even though burning oil is very uncompetitive for grid power generation. There's a reason the majority of the ships in the US Navy are not nuclear powered.
Cost and time are a big part, but not the only part.
A real question is whether we can do with REN alone or not. If we can, good, let’s do it. If we can’t, then we must find something else, regardless of costs.
And by “do it” I mean electrify as much as possible (transports, heating, industries where possible) and compensate where we can’t (airplane, agriculture, cement).
Are we positive that we can make it? And what happens if we can’t? Should plan for the unhappy scenario too?
That was always the killer for CANDU. If industry has to carry the whole cost of research, education, regulation, and training operators, our market is too small to support it. And the big buyers all have their own (weapon program adjacent) programs. We might have a renaissance with SMRs, but we’ll be contributors, not independents.
For baseload power I agree, but looking at Zaporizhzhia in Ukraine, it's hard not to see the downsides of nuclear: it's vulnerable to water/cooling issues and can be weaponized by terrorists or an invading army.
Solar has none of these issues, and is resilient/decentralized as well.
Same can be said about cities: they are vulnerable to water issues (if a city loses access to water, it’s a major disaster), and military can weaponize them as fortification.
Does it mean that we shouldn’t build cities? No, obviously not, that’s silly: it just means that you have to make sure water is flowing, and that military invasions are hugely destructive.
Cities have multiple water sources, and it is a very complex system. Not to mention we have special trucks and responses when that happens (at least in the USA).
Do cities have redundant water sources though? Not all of NYC's water goes through Hillview Reservoir, but it seems like a pretty serious vulnerability to me. It doesn't seem like a terrible analogy.
But cities are worth the risk, can you say the same about nuclear plants? Most established designs can't operate as peaker plants, or even seasonal plants (eg: covering for solar in the winter when there is less sun and more load for heating). They are expensive because they are mired in political issues and red tape. I don't think it has to be like that, and I wish it weren't. But is fixing nuclear an easier problem to solve than to invest in grid storage and more dynamic pricing?
> and can be weaponized by terrorists or an invading army.
These risks seem vastly overstated for a large fraction of the world. That such events happen occasionally does not mean the entire world needs to be on a war footing all the time. That would be incredibly wasteful.
> it's vulnerable to water/cooling issues
Yeah that seems more like an issue but may be solvable by using sea water for cooling?
> These risks seem vastly overstated for a large fraction of the world. That such events happen occasionally does not mean the entire world needs to be on a war footing all the time. That would be incredibly wasteful.
That’s part of the problem. It’s an asymmetric risk/cost issue. The attackers only need to get it right once, you need to defend your installation constantly.
Security for nuclear power stations already increase the upkeep cost considerably.
Nuclear has been and is being invested in. Governments fund a huge amount of nuclear R&D and also often heavily subsidize plant construction. When utilities crunch the numbers to decide what to invest in building, they overwhelmingly don't choose nuclear. And yes, they are certainly taking into account intermittency, "base load" whatever you want to call it.
There are arguments to be made that decision-makers at utilities aren't taking into account certain factors, for example in deregulated markets like Texas where reliability has perhaps been under-rewarded by the market design. But I think one should be especially skeptical about arguments posted by laymen versus the experts who are actually putting their money where their mouth is.
I think solar makes sense in all of the places that otherwise are unused. Roofs and the shades of car parks, for example. But I am not a fan of giant fields of solar panels. Or worse, taking arable land and covering it with solar panels.
Nuclear (smallest geographic footprint and smallest overall environmental impact) + solar & wind is the way forward.
40 million acres in US are used to produce ethanol, thats 10 - 15% of gasoline.
The same 40 million acres as solar fields, would cover 100% of electricity needs as well as work for some crops.
Agricultural subsidies for ethanol and biodiesel are worldwide, and could be 100 million acres wasted! Everyone's complaining about food prices these days, these 100 million acres could be growing food instead.
In my opinion it would be better to let those vast acres be returned to the wild and build nuclear instead, which has a much smaller environmental footprint.
But I am not a fan of giant fields of solar panels. Or worse, taking arable land and covering it with solar panels.
Why are there any negatives here? A field of solar panels is far more valuable than a field growing corn to feed to cows.
Nuclear (smallest geographic footprint
This doesn't matter, there is no shortage of land. People living in high rises in the center of big cities think there is, but once someone looks at a map they see how much land is actually out there.
smallest overall environmental impact
According to what metric? You can't put a nuclear plant anywhere, you have to be able to cool it.
there are always environmental impacts to land when we deprive it of sunlight, which is why picking the low hanging fruit of covering man-made structures with panels would be preferable over large fields
Since there are environmental impacts of land use, it seems we should maximize the return from each unit of land, to minimize the impact per unit of benefit.
Now, compare the value returned by an acre growing feed grain, to an acre collecting solar energy via PV. The latter has enormously higher return.
The argument you are making is not an argument against freestanding PV, it's an argument against agriculture. And yet, it is selectively applied to PV.
My state proposed a grid battery solution that would have provided power for the entire state for up to 1-2 days IIRC. They didn’t approve it, but the budget wasn’t astronomical. I honestly wonder if the worry about off hours use is a little overblown.
Infrastructure has a history of both being expensive up front and funded. Imagine if the US didn’t have highways and trying to explain all the impacts to the GDP that modern highways make. The price would almost seem trivial compared to the trillions per year of GDP that goes over asphalt.
> My state proposed a grid battery solution that would have provided power for the entire state for up to 1-2 days IIRC. They didn’t approve it, but the budget wasn’t astronomical. I honestly wonder if the worry about off hours use is a little overblown.
Which state?
Currently, the production scale battery tech that's available (LiIon, LFP), isn't really cost effective for multi-day backup. It's used for very short term (second to hour) and expensive demand response services (substituting for traditional natural gas peaker plants).
The cost/kWh needs to be about an order of magnitude lower to make economic sense for multi-day backup. It's coming, however. There are several contender technologies: metal air, flow, and sodium ion. All of those have much better cost and safety characteristics than Li-ion, while trading off the energy density (which doesn't matter in grid scale stationary storage).
5 hours is pretty doable with batteries and pumped storage. It's a lot and very expensive but not an impossible amount and there aren't any cheaper/quicker alternatives that I'm aware of.
I think Australia will be almost half way to 5 hours already once Snowy 2 is finished. That's just one pumped storage plant & studies show that the geography to build more is plentiful.
That last 3% can probably be eventually provided with via hydrogen, which, unlike the other two, is inefficient to roundtrip (~45%) but it lets you store large amounts of power for long durations easily.
I do not understand why there is not more focus on fuel synthesis. If electricity becomes “free” for hours a day, even crummy roundtrip efficiency seems like a great option to soak up extra capacity and get long term (seasonal?) storage.
You are describing e-fuels. Hydrogen from excess renewables is the same idea. The critics are simply not paying attention to the fact that green energy is nearly free and therefore fuels made from it can also be nearly free.
Is green electricity suppose to be nonviable now? If you can accept that green electricity, which will be the dominate source of unexpected cost, is going to be very cheap, then anything predominately made from it will also be very cheap.
This is a repeat of the anti-wind and solar attacks because it is the same general principle. Basically an appeal to the unknown that the new green technology couldn't possibly be cheap, despite plenty of evidence that cost is dropping or that there is no expensive supply chain.
The key is sufficiently cheap electrolysers. They are below $300/kW now. The other steps (if any) have higher capital cost/energy cost ratios, so they can be done when energy is more expensive.
There's a tradeoff between the cost of excess solar/wind and the capacity factor of the electrolysers. You can get a handle on where the tradeoffs lie by looking at optimizations using historical weather data.
For Finland, the 2030 assumptions number (for "synthetic baseload" from renewables + storage) is just under their "EPR" number (which may be a bit optimistic, given your experience with an EPR). As I said, Finland is a tough case for renewables. The solution has > 400 MW each of solar and wind, and 110 MW of electrolysers (to provide 100 MW of synthetic baseload).
As I said, Finland is one of the worst locations for renewables. There, nuclear remains at least within spitting distance of being competitive.
But as I also said elsewhere in these comments, this just means Finland (and other nearby countries at high latitude and without good wind resources) will become energy ghettos. They will lose their energy intensive industries. You will not be able to compete in such industries with countries where solar seasonality is low and insolation is very high. This means your energy consumption per capita will be depressed. Can a nuclear industry survive powering a handful of such disadvantaged countries? Maybe they'll just import energy from elsewhere (hydrogen can be piped like natural gas; while it has less energy per unit volume it also has considerably lower viscosity, reducing pumping costs.)
> What pumped storate? Everybody is already about maxed out on hydro capability.
You are making the common mistake of assuming pumped hydro must, like primary hydro, be built on rivers. But pumped hydro just requires two reservoirs near each other with a vertical offset (although one can imagine repurposing an existing on-river reservoir by adding a separate off-river reservoir nearby at a different altitude; any reservoir with a sizeable hill nearby would do.) They could be built anywhere that isn't flat, even in deserts.
This web site uses geographical data to find PHES opportunities around the world. The possibilities are enormous.
As an example, here's a facility being built near Ely, Nevada. Look how arid the area is. This facility is sized to provide 1000 MW of output for 8 hours. At $2.5B, the cost of the project is ~$316/kWh of storage capacity.
> What batteries? The world is barely producing enough for EVs and other stuff, there aren't enough GWhs available for utility storage.
You are again making a foolish argument that production of things cannot be increased. Please stop. One would almost begin to think you're arguing in bad faith here.
Theyre not commercially available because theres no market for it not because theres anything infeasible about it - cost-wise or otherwise.
The amount of deployed solar and wind around the world isnt even enough to turn off the gas turbines during the sunniest windiest days yet. Theres little point to electrolyzing gas into existence until it routinely overproduces and beyond existing storage capacity and by a lot. Needing to close that 3% gap? That'd be a good problem to have but we are years away.
And then, there is little reason to burn that gas in turbines until existing consumers of hydrogen (like ammonia plants) have had their fill of it. Even before it's used in turbines, it would operate as dispatchable demand. And when it's used in turbines, it will be mixed with natural gas at first. Below about 20% H2 existing combustors work fine.
Yes, and this is possible, and has been done before. The point I was making is that it's not necessary to do it immediately. There are intermediate steps where it isn't necessary.
I would humbly suggest that in future you try to avoid using rhetorical questions to make a point when the rhetorical question can be answered by google.
The fact that these rhetorical questions carry what appears to be a distinctly anti environmental agenda doesnt exactly make this incuriosity better.
> I would humbly suggest that in future you try to avoid using rhetorical questions to make a point when the rhetorical question can be answered by google.
It was not a rhetorical question.
Furthermore the first hit on Google is:
"GE, DOE Accelerating the Path towards 100% Hydrogen"
The rest of the results are various reports of testing, research and trials.
None of these refute the original quote from the 2023 Lazard report:
"Combustion turbines for 100% hydrogen are not commercially available today."
Neither does the link you provided, which is full of weasel words.
As such 100% hydrogen combustion turbines very much do not seem to be a solved problem. I will concede that there appear to be some prototype/experimental 100% hydrogen combustion turbines, which is great. Still no commercial availability, tho.
Siemens (from the first page of Google results) probably has a more realistic take on the matter:
" H₂ capabilities of our medium-sized gas turbines
As of today, the gas turbines we're testing in our new Zero Emission Hydrogen Turbine Center are ready to burn up to 75% of hydrogen in the fuel mix. And step by step we aim to reach 100% by 2030."
So, perhaps we can agree that 100% hydrogen combustion turbines are an aspirational technology. Something that might come about in the next decade or so.
> The fact that these rhetorical questions carry what appears to be a distinctly anti environmental agenda doesnt exactly make this incuriosity better.
LOL.
I will begin by reminding you of the Hacker News guidelines:
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
I will continue with noting the we, in Finland, produce about 90% (IIRC) of our electricity without fossile fuel emissions. How are you guys doing?
So you can take your "anti environmental agenda" and do something interesting with it in dark, enclosed spaces.
Sidestepping the incorrect use of "rhetorical", I do wonder what it is about facts and relevant questions that get under the skin of some people?
Is it just the embarrassment of realizing that one's arguments are without merit or the facing one's inability to coherently explain metters?
>The rest of the results are various reports of testing, research and trials.
Right, coz the technology, which exists and is deployed, is being refined before being commercialized at scale ready for the future mass market opportunities that are, as I mentioned, yet to materialize.
>Sidestepping the incorrect use of "rhetorical", I do wonder what it is about facts and relevant questions that get under the skin of some people?
I found it kind of funny actually. The number and nature of questions suggested a high level of ignorance (e.g. this easily googled one) that was coupled with a overtly arrogant attitude. Hoisted on your own petard so to speak ;)
I can't be bothered to answer questions from somebody who uses a deluge of rhetorical questions to argue a covert or overt anti-environmental position in bad faith though. One google to prove you 100% wrong about is sufficient.
Pro tip: try to avoid histrionics about "what to do when the sun doesnt shine and the wind doesnt blow" in future if you want to sound less like a coal lobby pamphlet from 2012 ;)
I strongly recommend you acquaint yourself with a dictionary. Look up "rhetorical". I can suggest other words also.
> I can't be bothered to answer questions
Well, I can't blame you if you don't know or can't articulate answers.
> One google to prove you 100% wrong is sufficient.
Sure, I'll take the bait. What is your one true google then?
> Pro tip: try to avoid histrionics about "what to do when the sun doesnt shine and the wind doesnt blow". its so 2012 ;)
Here's another pro tip: go outside. Observer. You will see and feel that the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow. You can even find occasions when both meteorological phenomenons occur.
Then look at electrical generation charts. Note that both sun and wind production varies. Note that low or zero generation of both occurs.
I mean, this is basic kindergarten stuff. I can't believe I have to spell out the obvious to somebody that can both read and right. Don't know about the comprehension part, tho.
A hilarious thing about his argument is that it also would rule out nuclear.
Existing thermal burner reactors cannot power the world -- the cheap uranium they depend on would run out too quickly. So, one either needs breeder reactors or cheap seawater uranium extraction. And neither of those are available commercially.
Industrial combustion turbines have been available for decades that burn hydrogen (in waste gases from various industrial processes, and also in jet engines adapted to burn hydrogen). It's just a matter of designing a combustor that works with the gas. This is known to be a solvable problem. If a particular high end gas turbine that's available today doesn't yet have a hydrogen combustor, that just means this solvable problem has to again be solved in this case.
> It rejects the insinuation that this is somehow an obstacle to using hydrogen burning turbines in the future.
There is no insinuation, it's just a statement of fact. Combustion turbines for 100% hydrogen are not commercially available today. We literally cannot burn 100% hydrogen at scale to provide utility power today.
We may be able to do so in the future, which would be great. Even better if we can do so without emissions and cheaper than other alternatives. But we cannot do so today.
Siemens thinks we can do 100% combustion turbines in about a decade or so. Time will tell. There may be obstacles or maybe everything goes swimmingly.
> And that insinuation is there, or else why did you bring that up?
I brought it up because it is a pertinent detail.
Hydrogen is touted as being the solution to storage for renewables. We are still far from that.
According to https://model.energy/ it might not be such an affordable solution. And even with 100% hydrogen combustion turbines there is the question of storage. Salt caves are cheap, steel storage tanks aren't.
I have always been skeptical that grid storage was the hidden cost of solar, and that multiple weeks of total grid output storage were needed, but this makes convincing arguments that only a few hours of storage is needed, even in difficult areas.
In Finland solar produces no power three months of the year. The months before and after that are marginal. To add joy, there are windstill periods of days, sometimes more than a week, in winter.
To add insult to injury, there isn't enough transmission capability to import all the renewable energy we would need to solely rely on renewables. There isn't enough hydro either so rely on that to take up the slack.
So, grid storage really is the hidden cost of both solar and wind, and multiple weeks of total grid output storage is needed for energy security if relying on renewables.
To reinterate, I really want to learn more about real long term storage. Anybody know where I can find solid info on that?
Yes, but it's 280 pages. Which parts in particular address long term storage?
Searching for "storage" gives very few hits. This was perhaps the most pertinent hit:
"IT IS GENERALLY NOT ECONOMICALLY FEASIBLE TO
store electricity in bulk. The widespread
deployment of new storage technologies and/
or high penetrations of electric vehicles may
someday change this, but these developments
are unlikely before 2030."
along with this:
"Compressed air energy storage (CAES) is the
only other storage technology [other than pumped hydro]
that has achieved
long-term utility-scale operation.
...
Only two utility-scale CAES facilities have
been constructed worldwide: a 290 MW facility
with two hours of storage in Huntorf, Germany,
that entered commercial operations in 1978 and
a 110 MW facility with 26 hours of storage in
McIntosh, Alabama, that entered commercial
operations in 1991."
> Most seem to think 4 hours qualifies as storage.
It does in some places. In Finland (where I presume you are), it clearly isn't enough, but in warmer places like Texas and California and the huge swathes of the world that have sufficiently reliable renewable electricity resources that 4 hour storage could handle the intermittency.
One problem is that currently the mix of solar is low enough that grid storage has to be sold as "backup" or "leveling". Grid storage that is actually used will for obvious reasons have a better cost-benefit ratio. If you still have three times as much gas as you do solar, why would you buy a battery?
I‘m also a fan of nuclear but do you think as a global economy we can collectively invest into multiple huge industries at the same time which aim to solve the same issue (too-cheap-to-meter & renewable power, deployed asap to avoid runaway climate change)?
What I mean is that wind + PV are on a roll at the moment. This has turned into a huge and hungry global industry which has a lot of momentum (people wanting to work there, technical readiness, investors ready to supply capital, public acceptance, pretty decent public opinion on the industry).
From personal experience, I used the live in Munich where one of the main industry fairs (Intersolar) takes place, and it‘s a huge and ever growing event.
So even though I like nuclear and agree that the currently running reactors should stay online as long as possible, I appreciate that getting the nuclear power industry to the same fitness level as the solar industry would take a long time (which we don‘t have) hence me preferring solar.
This is a zero-sum mindset, which I believe applies here.
The problem with nuclear is and has always been the opportunity cost. If you have $15 billion today -- you could tie it up for a decade and you might get a working 1GW reactor in 10 years (though probably more like 15).
Or you could spend $1 billion/year and end up with probably 15GW of utility solar in the
same time frame? Even at a 20% capacity factor instead of a 95% one, you'd be making far more money from Day 1 with solar and since we're not remotely at the saturation point of renewables, every watt generated would still be useful. The right answer to whatever qualms people have about time-of-use / duck curves would be to invest more like $800M/year in generation and $200M/year in storage -- but still -- literal multiples of energy produced with almost zero ongoing costs.
> The problem with nuclear is and has always been the opportunity cost.
What opportunity cost? What else are you going to spend the money on that gives you non-polluting 24/7 power output rain or shine?
> If you have $15 billion today -- you could tie it up for a decade and you might get a working 1GW reactor in 10 years (though probably more like 15).
The best time to build a nuclear power plant was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
What we need is to build nuclear power at scale. Doing the same thing repeatedly for years in bound to bring both the construction time and cost down.
> Or you could spend $1 billion/year and end up with probably 15GW of utility solar in the same time frame?
What use is 15GW of solar in northern climes when you cannot use it when you need it and you cannot store it? In Finland solar has no output three months of the year and an additional two months of marginal output. Additional we need power 24/7, especially in winter.
> Even at a 20% capacity factor instead of a 95% one, you'd be making far more money from Day 1 with solar and since we're not remotely at the saturation point of renewables, every watt generated would still be useful.
I must confess I am unsure how the long term economics of renewables will work out. Around here renewables are pushing prices into the negative and increasing volatility.
As a funny aside, 15 GW is the peak power usage in Finland. Adding that much generation capacity would totally saturate the market.
> The right answer to whatever qualms people have about time-of-use / duck curves would be to invest more like $800M/year in generation and $200M/year in storage -- but still -- literal multiples of energy produced with almost zero ongoing costs.
How many GWh of storage can you get for $200M? My guess is far from enough.
We need days at a minimum, weeks for preference. 4 hours is nowhere enough.
> What opportunity cost? What else are you going to spend the money on that gives you non-polluting 24/7 power output rain or shine?
The opportunity cost of dollars - nobody is going to spend $15 billion on nuclear when much better investments exist.
> We need days at a minimum, weeks for preference. 4 hours is nowhere enough.
Why in the world would you need that much storage? Obviously Finland + solar aren't 100% compatible given the latitude, but fairly extensive modeling shows a route to 99% renewable Australia with only 5 hours storage:
Change the mix to favor wind resources and you could likely achieve the same in Finland with some modest investments in transmission infrastructure.
We would be in a better and cheaper world if we had built a nuclear-first grid 30 years ago -- but we didn't -- and it just doesn't make sense to try to do so now when much cheaper options exist.
> The opportunity cost of dollars - nobody is going to spend $15 billion on nuclear when much better investments exist.
What better investment opportunity? Again, what else are you going to spend the money on that gives you non-polluting 24/7 power output rain or shine?
> Why in the world would you need that much storage?
You ask and answer yourself in the very next sentence:
> Obviously Finland + solar aren't 100% compatible given the latitude
> fairly extensive modeling shows a route to 99% renewable Australia with only 5 hours storage:
There are always geographies that have advantageous positions for electrical generation. Iceland has geothermal, Norway hydro, etc. This does not mean you can generalize.
> Change the mix to favor wind resources and you could likely achieve the same in Finland with some modest investments in transmission infrastructure.
Nah. Just like solar wind is highly variable. Just this week wind production varied between 55 MW and 3,8 GW.
Peak deman is about 15 GW. Subtracing 4 GW of nuclear and 2 GW of hydro, what are you going to do, overbuild current wind capacity 160x?
> We would be in a better and cheaper world if we had built a nuclear-first grid 30 years ago -- but we didn't -- and it just doesn't make sense to try to do so now when much cheaper options exist.
I'm still at a loss off what those better options are.
What better thing can I buy for $15B that gives me access to 1,6GW of generation capability 24/7?
> But the fanfare surrounding the phasing-out of coal and oil needs to be tempered with some realism… grid instability… investment in fossil fuel supply will rise by more than six percent…
There's a paragraph about 2/3rds down that rolls out all the usual BS, and links to an article, by the same author, suggesting we need to slow down renewable rollout as it is "destabilising the grid".
Can you please respond to this? I just want to make sure misinformation isn't being spread.
>Just curious because this question is always posed when HN disagrees with something. Are the recent climate events actually statistically significant?
If you mean: can we prove that man-made climate change is a factor in making some recent weather events (hurricanes, floods, wildfires, droughts etc.) worse, then yes:
The context is I was responding to this post you made
>(2021)
And I'm not sure if it's posted by someone who still agrees with that conclusion or someone who think things have moved fast enough in the last couple of years to make it seem silly in retrospect.
So I guess what I really want to know is:
1) what changed within the last two years that would cause an accelerating amount of climate change
2) how confident are we in that answer
3) does that answer provide any predictive power going forward. Ie, should we expect the rate of change to keep increasing or hold steady?
I don't need a link to any studies, I'll take your word for it.
1) we continue to emit more GHGs than we ever have before every single year. The "good" news in 2023 was that our yearly output didn't rise as much as we feared it would, but it still rose.
2) We're very confident in that answer
3) We hope that this year, we might actually stop increasing the amount of GHG emitted, potentially even outputting slightly less than the year before. If the rollout of renewables, EVs, carbon fees etc. continues as it is then we'll hopefully see this rate fall over time, like the glide paths proposed for net zero 2050. But at the moment it seems like that will lock in centuries of heating, if we don't start global scale GHG removal at some point, on top of complete replacement of fossil fuels, which is a necassary but not sufficient step.
Are we any closer to solving seasonal storage at high latitudes? I guess solar is taking the slack out of marginal power production, but relies on fossil fuels or nuclear to fill the gaps.
My personal gripe with renewables is that, except for some geographies, it is unlikely we can run the whole economy on renewables due to storage issues, at which point you can't make any more progress with renewables. You would then need nuclear to decarbonize further, by which point you may just as well have built nuclear in the first place.
Where I live there are no subsidies for nuclear, as the country is far too developed for that technology and now relies on coal, together with some seasonal sun and wind.
The worst case of all renewable equipment being landfilled would be acceptable. Any recycling would just be icing on the cake.
Also, the materials going into renewable infrastructure powering society will be small compared to materials going into society as a whole. If recycling can be done on the latter, it could be done on the former. If it can't be done on the latter, the former wouldn't matter. And the recycling on general materials is a problem that comes up even in a nuclear-powered society.
If my optimistic math is right you need around a dozen solar pannels per person. If a third of energy is supposes to come from solar around a billion sollar pannels are needed. If you don't think longevity and recyclability matters on that scale, I think you should reconsider what "sustainable" means.
My point is that it's not an argument against renewables per se. If industrial society powered by nuclear (or unicorn farts) is sustainable, it implies recycling is either unnecessary or solvable.
You are selective in your concern. Is industrial society as a whole ok? It will produce much more waste that needs recycling that solar/wind will. If it is ok, then why would solar/wind not be?
Well, anyone who believed in solar could have invested in solar-related technologies, and anyone who didn't believe in solar probably wouldn't invest.
So, if you put your money where your mouth is(/was), you could be reaping the benefits. FSLR is +260% and SEDG is +440% over 5 years.
Plus, something far more important than money, is that any time a solar-denier talks about anything forward looking in the future, you can rub their face in the fact that they mispredicted solar so badly.
Meh, there's some truth there, but we all know it's more complicated than just "buy solar stock -> make lots of money". An industry can BOOM while perfectly rational investors lose a buttload of money because the particular companies/etfs they picked weren't the ones that benefited from the boom.
I've observed the same. However I've also found, at least older engineers, often to be oddly conservative despite a huge overlap with being Star Trek fans.
Makes no sense. Maybe it's like the brain gets really efficient at solving problems in a specific way that it gets harder to see problems from another angle.
Regardless it's a really exciting time to be an engineer.
The mirror universe is fascist, and sexist and racist.
The normal one, well, everything is shown to be run by a military organization, Starfleet, ranging from exploration to first contact and diplomacy. Federation ambassadors are portrayed as spoiled, clueless clows. All while attributing Starfleet a clear moral superiority.
And even shows like DS9, the Maquis angle hints at some moral dilema regarding the occupied colonies, show that obedience, following orders and some higher moral principle trump whatever pro-Maquis Starfleet personl might think. Because after all, if the heros ignore protocol or orders they never stabd against Starfleet. Overall, it is pretty militaristic in nature.
So I think we're operating on different interpretations of the term 'militaristic'.
Star Trek primarily depicts the Federations (of planets) Military on the frontier of their space.
The society within the Federation is generally a democratic one and the use of Star Fleet is not to invade.
"Starfleet's function was to explore unknown territory on the behalf of the Federation government, to defend the Federation and its allies from threats, to further Federation policies and interests throughout interstellar space, and, when applicable, to initiate first contact with newly-discovered worlds and to engage in diplomatic negotiations on the behalf of the Federation. "
"Unlike its traditional rivals who derive power from a single dominant species subjugating other races within the boundaries of their empire, the Federation's various Member States join willingly and are equals in the Federation's democratic society."
"Militarism is the belief or the desire of a government or a people that a state should maintain a strong military capability and to use it aggressively to expand national interests and/or values. It may also imply the glorification of the military and of the ideals of a professional military class and the "predominance of the armed forces in the administration or policy of the state (see also: stratocracy and military junta).... Militarism has been a significant element of the imperialist or expansionist ideologies of many nations throughout history. "
"A military junta is a government led by a committee of military leaders. The term junta means "meeting" or "committee" and originated in the national and local junta organized by the Spanish resistance to Napoleon's invasion of Spain in 1808."
National interests: Enforcing the prime directive and expanding the Federation through the discovery, and inclusion, of planets and civilisation. Also, diplomacy seems to mainly handled by starfleet, so soft power is handed over to the military. This also covers the aggressive expension bit.
Starfleet is portrayed as the defining element of the Federation. And throughout history, the military handling all aspects of civil admin was a very rare exception. Even just the majority is extemely rare. Once the military controls it, well, we are beyond a militaristic society and squarely in military dictatorship territory.
The Federation's national interests are driven by two primary objectives: the enforcement of the prime directive and the expansion of our alliance through the discovery and inclusion of planets and civilizations. These noble pursuits have formed the foundation of our society, aiming to foster peace, understanding, and cooperation among diverse species.
It is true that Starfleet, as the exploration and defense arm of the Federation, assumes a significant role in upholding these interests. Through its diplomatic efforts and scientific missions, Starfleet acts as an ambassador of the Federation, promoting peaceful relations and extending our shared values to uncharted territories. The use of soft power by Starfleet helps facilitate dialogue and cooperation, providing a platform for resolving conflicts and building alliances.
However, it is important to maintain a delicate balance between military and civilian authority. History has shown us that when the military assumes control over all aspects of civil administration, it is a rare exception and not the norm. Such a scenario tends to blur the lines between defense and governance, potentially leading to an imbalanced and potentially authoritarian society.
While Starfleet plays a crucial role in protecting the Federation and expanding its influence, it must coexist harmoniously with civilian institutions, where governance, legislation, and civilian oversight are essential. The principles of democracy, respect for individual rights, and the rule of law should guide our decision-making processes, ensuring that our society remains true to the values we hold dear.
By striking a balance between Starfleet's military capabilities and civilian administration, we preserve the essence of the Federation—a diverse, democratic alliance built on principles of exploration, cooperation, and respect. Through the concerted efforts of both civilian and military entities, we can ensure that the Federation continues to flourish without veering into the territory of a militaristic dictatorship.
> the command structure of Star Fleet mirrors the military
This. For someone with a longing for a culture that values duty, and with it, a sense of place and responsibility, a community with hierarchy, et cetera, Star Trek delivers. Today, those elements largely live within conservative America.
Just take a look at any recent thread about electric vehicles and especially about Tesla. Same luddites talking about how everybody needs to drive 1000km without stopping every day.
There is this idea that we are building wind and solar plants to match the consumption of an average cloudy day with not much wind. If we are able to reach that level of production, we will have an overwhelming excess of essentially free energy on days when when the weather is actually favorable for renewables. As a consequence, on those days we can do energy intensive activities such as produce synthetic fuels or hydrogen, etc. very very cheaply. To me that is pretty exciting.
It is exciting. As long as overbuilding renewables is cheaper than grid scale storage, that will be the outcome. Battery advancements will probably eat away at this quite a lot though.
What really will also be amazing is when the cost of renewals plus some storage (like a days worth) crosses below the price of operating a natural gas power plant. At that point the whole grid will go green very quickly. We’re a ways from there, but it’s also probably not as far away as many think.
Careful of the municipal utility bait and switch! Here in Idaho they recently adjusted the net metering credit to greatly decrease the value of solar energy.
They waited until there was a lot of solar adoption in the state, and then pulled the rug on solar owners under the guise of “making sure everyone pays their fair share”
I wouldn't characterize that as a bait-and-switch, but as adjusting to economic reality. When solar is <1% of penetration, a solar kWh is basically just as valuable as any other kWh. When solar gets over 10% of penetration, a solar kWh is worth much less than any other kWh - when the sun is shining, energy is plentiful. By the time you get to ~25% solar penetration, energy is almost free on a sunny day at noon, and much of the value moves into storage, to move the solar energy from noontime to the evening.
Nonsense, until 100% of daytime generation is solar/wind every KW added still offsets generation from other sources. This myth is mostly perpetrated by the suppliers of power based on more expensive and more polluting sources who see the value of their investments slashed.
I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss timerol's point as nonsense.
I live in Belgium. I was doing some electrical work in my home recently. On the 29th of May, I noticed two out of three phases were close to 250V instead of the intended 230V. This is the limit where inverters of solar installations switch themselves of; it indicates more solar power was being produced than could be absorbed by the grid.
It turns out the day-ahead electricity market prices on that day were negative for 8 hours. As I noticed with my voltage meter, such price signals are trying to tell us something. Shielding market participants from those signals (e.g. by net metering) will cause real technical problems.
I already try to be part of the solution by charging my EV around solar noon, even tough I don't have solar panels. And I will switch to dynamic hourly pricing soon. But one person voluntarily acting on price signals is not going to be enough.
I already documented precisely this in another comment. Inverters switching off means that everything works exactly as designed. Negative prices are mostly on account of those producers that don't switch themselves off, such as nuclear power stations and baseline load providers that are too slow to adjust to demand or supply peaks.
With 50 panels on my property (a good 12.5 KW of generating capacity based on the nameplate power of one inverter and the peak capacity provided by the other) I probably am on the large size for a domestic installation. But you don't install solar power for peak capacity, you install it for average days and not so average days when you're going to need every Watt produced. And on those days (when power is scarce) you'll find that you are still consuming from the grid. That's the only issue with solar: when you need it most it isn't there. And so everybody gets to be happy: less CO2 emitted, fewer fossil fuel tonnage burned as if there is no tomorrow and some cash back for those that invested in solar. In the long run everybody wins, in the short term some parties may have to review their spreadsheets. But those traditional suppliers definitely aren't losing money, in fact they made out like bandits over the last year or two.
Oh, and as for the 'intended 230 V' -> grid voltage can be between 228 and 252 inclusive without violating the standard. Nominally it is 240 V, not 230 V. The way inverters inject power into the grid is by syncing to it and then leading the phases a bit to cause current to flow. The RMS voltage will rise as a consequence of that.
Did you catch the "Belgium" in my comment? Here in the EU, the grid voltage is targeting 230 volt (± 10%). (Either between the two phases in a two phase system, or between phase and neutral in 3 phase systems.)
Fair enough, but I've never seen it drop below 228 and I've never seen it go above 253 and 240 is the rough midpoint between the two. I suspect this was to accomodate the UK which did have nominal 240V so that all of Europe could be 'one standard' without the requirement for gear to have many different voltage selections. So now the only time you see 230 is when the sun isn't shining the rest of the day you're much closer to 240. Incidentally: this is also why a bunch of older appliances are at risk of burning out. If they were marginal when we were still nominally 220V then 230V was already pushing it and 253 V (still within EU tolerance, 230 x 1.1 is 253!) will definitely cause damage. Newer gear is more forgiving about this. Hence the spike in business at white goods stores during days with lots of sunshine...
Older appliances typically had a whole raft of supply voltages to choose from 100, 110, 115, 120, 200, 220, 240 and sometimes even 127 and 245 and I'm pretty sure I've seen even weirder ones (150, 185 iirc). Now it's just 120 or 240 for regular consumer gear. BTW, brownouts are more of a risk than overvoltage, with brownouts a powersupply that autoranges might accidentally pick the lower voltage and then when the brownout ends magic smoke comes out.
That's not how energy markets work. This is by design and whether or not you think it's fair isn't really all that important. Energy prices are determined by the most expensive source of the moment, not by the least expensive one.
That's fair, but it would have to shift quite a bit still to get to the point where the marginal source would be a different one. Typically this is to all of the producers benefit (including the solar ones) so they tend to keep those most expensive sources alive at all costs.
I am fully pro solar, but the duck curve is a real thing. Time value of money and time value of electricity. If there is nobody to consume that extra juice it is of limited utility.
Extra solar power that doesn't get consumed simply isn't metered at the source. That's a direct function of how the grid works, as long as everybody plays by the transport rules regarding minimum and maximum voltage overcapacity is dealt with by simply reducing the amount of production. I see this up close almost every day on the local grid here, you can tell by 1 pm or so that the local grid is saturated and after that inverters start dropping off one-by-one until the voltage has dropped sufficiently for them to come back online again after a cool-down period (typically about an hour).
There is not such thing as 'extra juice', all that happens is that some panels are not generating. After all, if there were 'extra juice' that would imply forced consumption or some kind of giant sink load to take excess power. Neither of these happen, it's financial until some lower bound and then it gets technical.
The lower the impedance of the local grid the more margin there is for such adjustments to take place, if you are on a high impedance subnet in an otherwise low impedance grid chances are that your inverter(s) will shut down well before the grid itself has maxed out.
What’s “free” about maintaining the equipment or the cost of the equipment over time? The people that invested in installing solar still need to pay off the cost in order to break even. I guess they can eat the cost knowing that they’re saving the planet by giving away power they paid to harvest to a power company to profit off of.
You're misreading my comment a bit. It's only "free" on a sunny day at noon, because of the massive oversupply. The panels will make money, but at times when supply is lower, like after 2pm range. This depends on time-of-year as well.
Solar prices have been falling rapidly, so the value of a kWh of energy generated via solar has also been falling in competitive power generation markets.
This only happens a very small fraction of the day, typically within an hour either side of solar noon. And if the voltage goes up too far inverters will typically back off either incrementally or by shutting down entirely.
Net metering takes this fully into account, since it’s a dollar-for-dollar trade. I’d electricity is cheap during a certain part of the day, what they pay you is cheap.
The whole "paying the fair share" is just propaganda from oil companies. I saw a great video about that recently which sums up the situation nicely. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPfpa2KqYk0
I'm a fan of this guys channel, he does good work and is generally well informed and informative. This video was by far his worst ever. Yes, the groups supporting this stuff have questionable motives, but the fact is that the payment model for power needs to change under a "prosumer" paradigm. Disentangling grid connection fees and power fees just makes sense. And yes, it does reduce the incentive of putting rooftop solar, but that's because the incentive was artificially high. Being connected to the grid is a valuable service that should be paid for. We used to pay for that because the cost was baked into the price of power. Now that some people are, on net, not buying power, it needs to be disentangled. Infrastructure needs to be maintained, and that has costs that need to be paid even as we switch to a renewable future.
Imagine a situation where everyone has rooftop solar, enough that, under net metering, they pay no fees. What happens? The power company goes under and now you don't have a grid. Which every one of those solar users _still needs_. There is _value_ in being able to buy power when you want it and produce it when you don't, and that value should be paid for.
> Why is this important? Because the potential impact of net-metered solar on electricity prices doesn’t even become relevant until you reach higher levels of penetration, or roughly 10% and beyond.
I think what I said was in line with that video's conclusions, which seemed to be arguing for continued net metering in the eastern half of the country, and used CA as an example of when the current policy hits its limits.
Real time variable rates are needed. These would also incentivize all sorts of load shifting strategies, which are very economically advantageous, if the damned pricing system can allow them.
That's very common in Finland and I think in many other countries in Europe. People use their water heaters, charge cars, etc. during the night when it's basically free.
The old scheme was variable rates on a fixed schedule. I'm talking about more flexible variable rates that correspond to actual conditions (both supply and demand), adjusted at high cadence.
That also happened in CA but if you already had solar panels you continue with the same rate for a while. Doesn't seem right to switch it for those already installed.
Doesn't seem right to limit it at all, new or already installed. In fact they should be quadrupling down on incentives for solar considering climate change.
If what you care about is climate change, single home rooftop solar is a _terrible_ investment. It's dramatically harder and more expensive to install relative to large installations. For the same exact dollar, you get nearly twice the installed capacity with large scale installations vs. home scale.
Why not both? With rooftop, you further accelerate the growth of renewables, and you get the benefit of not being beholden to regulatory capture and corrupt central authorities when they decide to do something stupid with the central power supply, and you also build up resilience in the grid with less single points of failure.
I'm not against rooftop solar. My parents have, what was, at the time of installation, the largest residential install in the state of CA. But rooftop solar is not a good use of resources for fighting climate change, which is what I was responding to.
I don't follow. How does it not help in the fight against climate change? It may be less effecient than central power but it still reduces emissions compared to fossil fuels, and it's not a zero sum game as it does not take away capacity from central power.
There is a disconnect for sure here - I said I agree that it may be inferior efficiency-wise. I also said that, nevertheless, it's still far better than fossil fuels. Both statements are true, and are not contradictory. It moves the needle in a positive direction on climate change which was my original statement. I never said anything about it being the best possible of all solutions. If you want to be pedantic, not using any power at all, and going back to an agrarian lifestyle is more efficient that centralized solar.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. There's no way that our governments are going to put all possible resources into a centralized renewable grid, so we should also incentivize private individuals to invest while we are waiting for our politicians and power companies to get on board.
I mean, if you want to waste your money, fine. The question is whether encouraging residential PV is good policy. I don't think it is in most cases (maybe if it allows homes to be totally disconnected from the grid, saving the cost of running lines out to them?)
> Careful of the municipal utility bait and switch! Here in Idaho they recently adjusted the net metering credit to greatly decrease the value of solar energy.
As other have said, people taking the bait changed the economics, and that forced the switch. To be fair, it was foreseeable.
Here in Australia we have the worlds highest rooftop solar take up. Feed-in rates are plummeting like a stone. It's not hard to see why - most days when the sun is shining brightly, the wholesale price of electricity is negative. Look at SA here at midday (the picture will change tomorrow): https://aemo.com.au/energy-systems/electricity/national-elec...
We do have plans here that expose you to that wholesale price. If you export electricity when the price is negative, you pay the grid.
Ironically, at the same time this over supply is happening all states that mainly use coal have been hit by a price rise this month. I got mine today. In 22 days, the price of my electricity is going up 45%. That mainly caused by renewables (and particularly solar) making the old coal plants uneconomical. They used to be able to sell power 24 hours a day. Now since they can't ramp down quickly they have to pay the grid to export their excess power during the day. I don't know whether that's the cause, but right now we have gigawatt coal plants shutting down years earlier than they said they would five years ago. Which is how we get a 45% price rise.
So we are in this situation where feed-in tariffs are worth nothing, electricity prices are going through the roof, we are throwing away a ton of electricity we can't use during the day and solar installs are slowing down.
The solution is storage, of course. Batteries were hard to justify price wise a few days ago. But after this 45% price rise changed that. Again it's a double whammy, but in reverse this time. Remember during the day the price goes negative. That means the grid pays you to charge your battery. I would not be surprised if for a while, the return on a battery will be higher than installing solar panels.
Which means the next phase of the renewable change over has hit us with a vengeance in Australia. It's the invisible hand of the market finally directing investment where it's needed most I guess. It arrived a little late, and it's not so much a hand as a fist. We would have been better off building storage a few years ago. And again, that was foreseeable. Indeed it was foreseen by numerous published articles. But who reads learned engineering articles on future electricity tariffs? Not your average noob looking purchase roof-top solar apparent and if the people hawking solar panel installs read them, they didn't mention it.
So here we are. We wanted an energy transition. Now we've got one, ready or not.
There seems to be some disagreement on numbers in various reports. This article says:
> "Global spending on solar power, the IEA projects, will hit $382 billion this year. That’s more than $1 billion per day. Investment in oil production, meanwhile, is estimated to total $371 billion."
In contrast, this articles says:
> "The annual Banking on Climate Chaos report, authored by a group of nonprofits, including Rainforest Action Network, said banks provided $673 billion in finance to the fossil-fuel industry last year. Canadian banks are providing a rising share of the money, though U.S. lenders are still the dominant player."
The discrepancy could be that the latter includes coal and gas investment, while the former is just oil?
More solar is good news, but it'll have little if any effect on global fossil CO2 emissions, as demand for energy in the developing world is steadily approaching the levels seen in industrialized nations. Replacing fossil fuels with renewables on any short (decadal) timespan would require at least a 10X increase in renewable investment over today's levels.
A lot of faceless funds. Utility-scale developments are usually built as a partnership between local utilities, a developer who acquires/leases land and builds the the site, and investors who buy the site and form a pricing agreement with the utilities. Sometimes the developer is also the investor. These are people who don't get out of bed for less than 8 digits.
Avantus is a large developer operating in the California/South West. You can look at their project partners for more. The developers require high touch relationships with local governments so they are very regional.
oilprice.com and renewablesnow.com together provide a decent broad overview of latest current news on investments and projects in the overall energy sector.
