> The idea here is that the website still has a sound URL structure, which is managed by the core browser functionality, while interactivity is carefully layered on top, with targeted updates.
It’s a long time since I have to work with websites. JQuery was the hot stuff back then. But we didn’t used it. It was all HTML and a Java backend. This sentence implies that right now basic stuff isn’t managed by the browser (but by React, Vue and so on?) which seems to be simply wrong.
> This sentence implies that right now basic stuff isn’t managed by the browser (but by React, Vue and so on?) which seems to be simply wrong.
That's exactly what's happened. A React SPA .html is just an empty shell. A Next.js app renders HTML using React on the first load and then becomes an SPA on the client.
I have made many many web pages over the last 15 years of so that is for just a few months or days. What I do is archive it on way back machine, and if the page works on way back machine then that is my stamp of approval for the page. It can also tell you the page is self contained! It works pretty well with WebGL and event audio playlist. There is NO point of making web dev so complicated just because FANNG company are using the framework. It is designed for they corporate structure. Anyone else should NOT use FANNG based framework!
For long term web, I stay way from SPA with a long stick.
No one mentioned pandemic. It's a health threat--if this thing gets into a hospital its very, very hard to get rid of. Most people prefer their hospitals as sterile as possible.
Its also something that can become a damocles swoard. Like its living in your intestines harmlessly, but if you have a ulcer or somebody in your house gets with a cut near your toilet - exitus.
A global health threat doesn't have to be a pandemic affecting otherwise healthy people to be a global health threat. In this case, the threat would presumably be that the same bacteria winds up in health care facilities elsewhere.
The great (!) article misses the holy grail of the Energiewende in the chapter „Addressing the challenges of solar intermittency“: a intercontinental smart grid. As shown by data of ENTSO-E in Europe a power system plays a crucial part to overcome intermittency problems of renewables.
It really depends on what you call "long distance". Anyway, transportation loss for entsoe is public data [1]. You'd need to cross it with production/consumption data [2] in order to get relative numbers.
For instance, France consumed 442 TWh and reported 1.07TWh of losses in 2022, which would be about 2.5% transportation losses.
Keep also in mind that batteries do two things: They can move loads in time, but they can also reduce transmission capacity requirements by increasing utilisation. As long as there is some time where the transmission line is not fully loaded (which today is true for _any_ transmission line even the limiting ones), then a battery on both ends allows you to use the capacity longer by charging the battery before the bottleneck with excess and once the input falls below discharging the battery to keep the line utilisation high.
The downside of this is that you now have a system that comes with all kinds of nasty additional complexities and failure cases from control theory.
But one misconception I often read is that everyone focuses on batteries. It would make more sense in general to talk about energy storage instead of just batteries. Like Kinetic, chemical, thermal and so on.
Batteries cannot be solely responsible for back-up. You need different types of storage: short term, medium term and long term storage.
There are different concepts for each application. Batteries, compressed air storage, pumped storage, kinetic, thermal storage as well as power-to-X systems are able to absorb the increasing summer power and provide the energy again in the medium term or seasonally shifted.
There are only three energy storage forms that are relevant for the next decade. All the others looked promising, but the learning curve on batteries has rendered them irrelevant. Your link is from 2020, it is out of date.
The best energy storage form is "final form". Some energy products can be stored. For example if you are using the energy to create heat, you can store heat for use in the future. Heat storage sucks as a way to store energy destined for electricity, but is a great way to store energy destined for use as heat.
The utility of batteries for daily storage is obvious and well proven.
Thirdly, the best annual storage is pumped hydro. It's the cheapest and it can be used pretty much everywhere -- all you need is water at one end of an elevation change and a way to build storage at the other end.
All the other forms that you'd think would fit in between the two are being quickly subsumed by the rapid price drops in battery pricing. The cutover points are rapidly shifting -- batteries are now cheapest for biweekly-ish.
And the primary sources are getting so cheap that overbuilding is an alternative to storage. Rather than storing for the reduced amount of daylight in the winter, just overbuild. More overbuilding and a few days of storage will let you handle a stretch of cloudy, windless days in January. No annual storage required.
> Thirdly, the best annual storage is pumped hydro. It's the cheapest and it can be used pretty much everywhere -- all you need is water at one end of an elevation change and a way to build storage at the other end.
Pumped hydro is primarily used for short term storage. The vast majority of pumped hydro installations around the world operate on an intra-day cycle.
For storage systems generally (not just electricity), profitability is a linear function of capacity, the possible price arbitrage AND how frequently you charge and discharge. Nobody is going to build a pumped hydro storage facility with the intension of operating a single charge/discharge cycle per year.
Nor are pumped hydro facilities cheap to build and certainly cannot be deployed everywhere as they require particular geographic and geologic conditions and mostly locations suitable for pumped hydro are few and far between and those locations that are suitable are generally far away from population centers where the demand for electricity is.
Batteries are often cheaper than pumped hydro, they can be located near demand, they scaled down as well as up and can be distributed around the grid to provide "virtual transmission". They are quick to deploy and require little maintenance or staffing.
The solution for "long term" storage will be massive over-provision of wind and solar and more grid interconnections. Batteries will take care of everything else.
Don’t get me wrong—I’d be all for batteries ruling the world if they were both affordable and technically advanced enough to meet various demands. That means they shouldn’t degrade too quickly, for example, when capturing and releasing wind energy in milliseconds. Or they shouldn’t lose too much energy over time due to self-discharge. Or they should be able to supply large amounts of energy instantly. Overbuilding is also a valid approach, especially in connection with a smart grid spanning multiple countries. All of that is fine.
However, the point of the study is different, and that makes it still relevant today: The barrier to expanding energy storage isn’t a technical one—it’s a political one. The study also shows that there is a great deal of variability, and the often-used argument that there’s not enough lithium or rare earth elements doesn’t hold up. More recent studies validate different storage technologies depending on their specific use case, showing that they can complement batteries in a meaningful way—also from a financial perspective.
Another perspective is that we still have a long way to go before full electrification. Right now, batteries are used in suitable scenarios, but many other areas haven’t been electrified or optimized at all. Other storage technologies might still become relevant. Building a house around a 20,000-liter tank to store energy for heating in Alaska over six months might already be financially and technically viable. But whether the logistical challenges of such solutions will ever make them truly feasible—that’s something I neither want nor can predict.
Only if we have more than enough renewable energy to spend making hydrogen. Hydrogen storage has a round-trip efficiency of 40%-50%, leading to significant energy losses. Partly by: Electrolysis requires 50-55 kWh to produce 1 kg of hydrogen, which only contains about 40 kWh, resulting in a 20%-30% energy loss upfront. It’s low energy density requires high-pressure or cryogenic storage, increasing costs and energy use, while leakage further reduces efficiency. Limited pipelines and refueling stations make hydrogen adoption costly and complex. Highly flammable hydrogen demands a lot of safety measures adding even more cost and complexity.
At the current exponential growth rate, PV will reach the point of supplying the entire world primary energy demand in a decade and a half.
Yes, hydrogen has low round trip efficiency. But it comes out cheaper than PHES. The "cost of inefficiency" is proportional to the number of charge/discharge cycles. For annual storage, efficiency is 365x less impactful than it is for diurnal storage. What matters for annual storage is capex of storage capacity.
I dispute this as well. From what I see, the very best case per kWh cost of just the reservoirs and waterways for PHES is about $10/kWh. Hydrogen stored as compressed gas in solution mined salt caverns would be an order of magnitude cheaper. For storage of liquid e-fuels in tanks, tank capex would be another order of magnitude cheaper still. This assessment is consistent with the link I posted earlier.
If you want something that may compete with hydrogen for annual storage, consider bulk thermal storage (using artificially injected heat, not naturally occurring heat). The thermal time constant of a very large object increases quadratically with radius, if everything is scaled proportionally, and can easily reach many years. This is why geothermal works at all -- there's plenty of heat stored in the near crust ready to be mined.
You're comparing using an existing reservoir for hydrogen to building a new reservoir for PHES. There similarly exist dry lake beds that could be used for water storage. But generally they're not in suitable locations, which is the same problem that salt mines will have.
You're also comparing hypothetical costs to historical costs. Hypothetical costs put out by industry are usually out by about an order of magnitude.
There's a reason that PHES is the only one with historical costs.
No, I was describing the cost of constructing a new hydrogen storage reservoir in a salt formation by solution mining. Of course existing natural gas storage caverns could be repurposed; that would be even cheaper.
These are not hypothetical costs. Construction of these caverns is state of the practice for natural gas storage. Vast volumes of gas are stored in these things, allowing steady production of natural gas and constrained pipeline capacity to serve seasonally unsteady consumption patterns.
The reason PHES is the only one with historical costs is that, historically, PHES has been used for diurnal storage, from the days when baseload plants were cheaper. There was never a market for long term storage via hydrogen (although some hydrogen storage has been constructed and used to help steady the hydrogen input to ammonia plants); why bother for the grid when just varying the use of fossil fuels would serve that function just as well?
Here's a presentation of a comprehensive NREL study from 2018, but I don't know the source of the numbers. It finds hydrogen and flexible generation (that is, natural gas turbines) are best for long duration storage. Notice the slides on page 13. PHS is way out of the running for the storage case being discussed here; it's not close.
Thanks. I mean it’s from 2018 and that is ancient history as far as storage costs are concerned. But yeah those $/kWh numbers for PHS are orders of magnitude higher. Thanks for the link, I’ll try to find the final study tomorrow
I think this is going to turn out like the exotic panel chemistries: batteries are simple and have powerful continual improvement in performance and price, while the others turn out to be more complicated. In particular solid state wins over mechanical anything almost every time.
I am on you side (but not all are more complicated and there are mechanical variations that are better than batteries for some scenarios) but the takeaway of that study is described here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43425560
The IPCC & IEA grossly underestimates PV (and Wind) by any metric for years. Many scenarios assumed costs for 2050 that are already outdated today.
In the same time they overestimate Nuclear Energy and carbon capture by any metric (debatable). It’s getting so bad that there are numerous studies about that problem.
I think a lot this comes down to huge cultural biases. And the two cultures are "hard energy" and "soft energy" folks. Coal, gas, fission, fusion, etc. are all hard energy. Coupled GDP and energy consumption was a core assumption. Renewables, energy efficiency, technological advancement via learning curves all fall under "soft energy".
Most of the energy industry was hard energy because that's what paid everyone's bills. Any estimates that did not cater at least a bit to those biases would just be completely ignored.
But there's another effect too: solar just completely outperforms even the most optimistic assessments. There's one famous solar financial analyst, whose name I'm blanking on, who continues to underestimate even though she knows the effect.
iCal them „simple“ and „complex“ power. For someone who isn’t truly informed, a „Simple Energy“ solution seems much simpler than one based on renewable energy. With „simple“ power, solving climate change appears straightforward: just build more nuclear plants, which conveniently replace coal and gas on a 1:1 basis since they are baseload power generators.
Renewable energy, on the other hand, is (for now, the transition time) complex. It requires a better, smarter, and much larger interconnected grid, as well as intelligent management of supply, demand, and storage. It means considering and understanding multiple aspects at once. This complexity often leads people who are convinced that more simple power is the answer to dismiss the idea of renewables too quickly—because nuclear seems so much simpler.
I understand the appeal of simple energy. The sad part is that many people likely believe this is the scientifically correct position. And they are often so convinced that, even when presented with current studies and reasonable arguments against new nuclear plants, they quickly assume that the other person is just an irrational, biased anti-nuclear activist. After all, the simplest solution must also be the right one, right?
Being informed in this context doesn’t just mean knowing the pros and cons of nuclear, wind, or solar power. It requires a deep understanding of what is technically and financially feasible today—including energy forms, grid transformation, storage solutions (not just lithium-ion batteries), follow-up costs, sustainability (mining, waste disposal), as well as political, economic, military, and social implications. And how all of these factors interact.
But none of that is necessary if you just want to build more simple power plants.
The transition to 100% renewable energy is as complex as the development of the internet. If we were still relying on letters, telephones, fax machines, newspapers, radio, and TV, the idea of transitioning to a globally available, instant multimedia internet would have seemed just as utopian and impossible.
“The cost of new nuclear is prohibitive for us to be investing in,” says Crane. Exelon considered building two new reactors in Texas in 2005, he says, when gas prices were $8/MMBtu and were projected to rise to $13/MMBtu. At that price, the project would have been viable with a CO2 tax of $25 per ton. “We’re sitting here trading 2019 gas at $2.90 per MMBtu,” he says; for new nuclear power to be competitive at that price, a CO2 tax “would be $300–$400.” Exelon currently is placing its bets instead on advances in energy storage and carbon sequestration technologies.
It’s a long time since I have to work with websites. JQuery was the hot stuff back then. But we didn’t used it. It was all HTML and a Java backend. This sentence implies that right now basic stuff isn’t managed by the browser (but by React, Vue and so on?) which seems to be simply wrong.
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