Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system • Hacker News Board

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#341

Post by markus_zhang » Thu, Jul 10, 2025, 1:28 PM UTC

stefs wrote: post #340

markus_zhang wrote: post #238

I recall that other power plants such as thermal power is still required to provide “inertia” for the whole system, as solar fluctuates a lot. The recent Spain-Portugal outage showed that there is not enough inertia in the system. I don’t really understand inertia in power plants but I wonder if it helps to push nuclear as primary and solar as secondary?

a nuclear power plant is very expensive and takes a long time to build. they're also designed to deliver constant output (i don't know how fast they can de-/increase output), so if power prices get into negative territory due to overwhelming solar output, nuclear power plants might have to operate at a loss, making its product comparably expensive. there are environmental factors (need for water sources for cooling),…

I so much hope that we (the world) replace thermal plants (except geothermal) with nuclear ones. But yeah there is a lot of resistance and it is very expensive.

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#342

Post by pjc50 » Thu, Jul 10, 2025, 1:31 PM UTC

markus_zhang wrote: post #264

pjc50 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is mostly a matter of control systems engineering: inverters tend to be perfectly grid-following, but there's no reason why the phase angle can't be adjusted to provide "virtual inertia". Same for battery systems - an early market for these in the UK is getting paid for "fast frequency response". Every battery can be a virtual flywheel. https://www.modernpowersystems.com/analysis/batteries-for-fa... Conversely,…

Thanks. One benefit about nuclear, maybe I’m overstretching a bit, is that it is a large system engineering project so hopefully it trains and retains many engineers and technicians. Maybe solar farm serves that purpose too? But somehow “nuclear” sounds more cool…

Is that a benefit or a cost? People these days have to train at their own expense, and construction trades are in something of a short supply.

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#343

Post by trillic » Thu, Jul 10, 2025, 1:36 PM UTC

harperlee wrote: post #331

lukan wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ships carrying energy are a pretty easy explosive target as well. Local ressilence is needed in any case and mass produced batteries can provide that safety.

Diesel, iron or aluminum, from your parent post, are difficult to explode… (personally, no clue about magnesium); and the point of the latter two is that you can “store” energy by upstreaming its consumption when power is available, you don’t necessarily need to produce an actual reversible energy store.

magnesium is the most explody of all those

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#344

Post by ben_w » Thu, Jul 10, 2025, 1:38 PM UTC

myrmidon wrote: post #284

ben_w wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People plant loads of trees for lumber, but you're right, it's an economics question in the end. This actually means I'm also worried about something currently impossible: that when we do develop the tech sufficiently to be useful, if it's cheap enough to be profitable, nothing would seem to stop extraction. So CO2 goes down to, what, 300ppm? Pre-industrial? Ice age? Same coin, other side. We want to flip a coin and…

> that when we do develop the tech sufficiently to be useful, if it's cheap enough to be profitable, nothing would seem to stop extraction. So CO2 goes down to, what, 300ppm? This is an extremely improbable scenario, for several reasons: 1) If you actually use the extracted CO2, then it gets re-emitted on use, and the atmospheric concentration is virtually unaffected. 2) Concentration difference alone makes it very u…

> 1) If you actually use the extracted CO2, then it gets re-emitted on use, and the atmospheric concentration is virtually unaffected.

Depends what you use it for, e.g. synthetic diamond windows won't re-emit unless they catch fire.

> 2) Concentration difference alone makes it very unlikely that we'll ever extract CO2 as cheaply as O2 from ambient air (or carbon from a mine), and CO2 is not really an appealing ressource compared to its components, either (so demand would presumable be pretty low for centuries, even if the price comes down a lot).

Underestimating how big an industry would get is the mistake Svante Arrhenius initially made, thinking it would take millennia to emit enough CO2 to cause noticeable global warming.

And remember, with this concern I'm inherently presuming tech (mainly energy) that makes it sufficiently cheap that business and/or governments are willing and able to remove in the order of at least one teratonne of the stuff (but hopefully not two or more teratonnes) — because less than that, it's not solving global warming.

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#345

Post by gosub100 » Thu, Jul 10, 2025, 1:38 PM UTC

idiotsecant wrote: post #335

Mengkudulangsat wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not feel as optimistic about any uptick in cables as I do about solar and wind. Solar and wind can grow through a multitude of small, plug-and-play projects. Cable projects like HDVC are still giant, long-term punts.

This is literally the problem. Transmission is desperately needed, much more than generation right now. The issue is that it's hard to explain to people why this is, and even when they understand they react like you do. RENEWABLES NEED TRANSMISSION!!! We need to be building unprecedented Manhattan project levels of transmission, yesterday! But instead we will put some solar panels on a car park and feel like we did o…

Is this whole "new set of cables" factored into the CO2 emissions equation? We're undoubtedly going to use massive amounts of energy to mine the metal, melt it into wire, transport it to the site, build the towers, etc. Is that energy "green" ?

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#346

Post by markus_zhang » Thu, Jul 10, 2025, 1:39 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #342

markus_zhang wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. One benefit about nuclear, maybe I’m overstretching a bit, is that it is a large system engineering project so hopefully it trains and retains many engineers and technicians. Maybe solar farm serves that purpose too? But somehow “nuclear” sounds more cool…

Is that a benefit or a cost? People these days have to train at their own expense, and construction trades are in something of a short supply.

I'm more thinking about the side of designing and implementing complex engineering systems instead of individual trades, but I'm just an armchair poster so don't know much.

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#347

Post by rel_ic » Thu, Jul 10, 2025, 1:39 PM UTC

Renewable energy is great, but we're not replacing fossil fuels with it, we're just adding more energy usage. And our energy usage is destroying the environment.

Don't let these advancements in solar make you think things are getting better. We need to reduce fossil fuel usage, not just increase solar usage.

https://pocketcasts.com/podcasts/b3b696c0-226d-0137-f265-1d2...

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#348

Post by amarait » Thu, Jul 10, 2025, 1:44 PM UTC

rel_ic wrote: post #347

Renewable energy is great, but we're not replacing fossil fuels with it, we're just adding more energy usage. And our energy usage is destroying the environment. Don't let these advancements in solar make you think things are getting better. We need to reduce fossil fuel usage, not just increase solar usage. https://pocketcasts.com/podcasts/b3b696c0-226d-0137-f265-1d2...

What replaces fossil fuels is some kind of breakthrough in batteries. At the moment its getting better every year were currently at less than $100 per KWh which is crazy but needs to be improved for allowing more off the grid energy consumption

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#349

Post by phtrivier » Thu, Jul 10, 2025, 1:47 PM UTC

dzonga wrote: post #163

phtrivier wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not "wasted by scribes" in the US - it very much goes into the pockets of the "pharaohs" (aka "corporate boards"), and, through campaigns donations, to the "high and low priests" (aka "politicians"). The fact that it was supposed to be used to cure peasants from malaria or ensure next year's yield of grain is just a detail. Don't bother questioning the pharaohs ! Instead, attend the ceremony for when we turn the…

please write a book. such a simple explanation.

Just riffing on [1], no intention of being serious, sorry.

Of course it's more complex than that.

I just needed to make the "cat" joke. Sorry again.

(That being said, I'm scared that learning more about the Egyptian scribe system would make me find even more similarities with our civilisation, and it would just be depressing. I get that any time I read about Rome.)

"Those who don't know history are bound to repeat it - but at least no one spoils the ending for them."

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#350

Post by teitoklien » Thu, Jul 10, 2025, 1:48 PM UTC

jjulius wrote: post #315

philipallstar wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The oil-soaked 20th century created all the millions of necessary precursors to miracles like phones and youtube and people in Namibia being able to get them. It's not out-hustled; it's just a miniscle increment. But it's good to see.

>... miracles like... youtube... ... miracle ?

lol, you have no idea just how hard it is to make something as mammoth size financially viable or even sustainable as a business, due to sheer technological bottlenecks in video streaming, encoding/decoding videos at that scale, and everything else.

It is a technological marvel, similar in comparison to designing and building an F-35 fighter jet or anything else.

It requires custom Hardware Accelerators designed at a chip level, on top of decades of algorithmic refining of video encoder decoders in stuff like gstreamer or ffmpeg, refining video streaming at inconsistent cellular data networks, various ISPs doing shenanigans with ports, etc. Storing and ingesting that much video data at "Free" initial pricing, streaming that much data to viewers, building analytics algorithms to pair advertisements with watchers, to get a high enough conversion rate to make ads economically viable enough while having minimal number of ads per vids.

Even an infinite money printer like google would struggle were it not for systematically solving technology at all levels from hardware, to chip design, to algorithms, to network level tuning, to frontend device optimizations, etc.

And has been made possible by only the cumulative effort of humankind to build such advanced sophisticated systems in the palm of our devices such that even a normie average iphone 16e has more compute capacity than early 1990s or so, much more.

It is a miracle, in every shape and form.