Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life • Hacker News Board

Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life

#291

Post by pfdietz » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 8:01 PM UTC

macspoofing wrote: post #290

pfdietz wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I was talking about when I dissed you for saying anything that wasn't existing yet couldn't exist. You need to censor your prejudices about renewable energy, your irrational dislike for it is leading you astray. These are engineering projects, not science projects. They are becoming practical not because of huge advances in science fictional novelties, but because the economic context (where fossil fuels…

>This is what I was talking about when I dissed Ha. Dissed? Is this high school? >These are engineering projects, not science projects. They are becoming practical not because of huge advances in science fictional novelties, You equivocate between things that are ready and proven NOW versus things that may be ready in the future. This is a common method of argument with proponents of wind and solar. How about this: T…

What's happening is that the environment in which these technologies have to work is changing. When fossil fuels were cheap and CO2 untaxed, it's really hard for renewables and storage to win.

But that's not going to be the world going forward. Fossil fuels have to be phased out, which means raising CO2 taxes as high as needed to make that happen. In that environment, it's suddenly highly profitable to push these technologies, and they will go from nothing to dominant in very little time.

The supposed advantage of nuclear, that it has already been demonstrated, means very little. Nuclear had its change to get better, and it got worse. It's already demonstrated it's a loser.

The market is already making the judgment on how this will turn out, whether you like it or not. Money is flowing into renewables and storage; very little is going into nuclear. Nuclear is old, tired, and slowly dying.

Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life

#292

Post by snapplebobapple » Mon, Jun 27, 2022, 3:32 AM UTC

thehappypm wrote: post #108

ThePhysicist wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Storage is a big, unsolved problem. As a quantitative resource on that I can recommend "Sustainable Energy: Without The Hot Air" by the great (and unfortunately recently deceased) David MacKay [1], it's available for free. For a large country like the UK or Germany you need to increase electricity production with a slew rate of 6-8 GW/h in the morning, and decrease it with the same rate in the evening. Currently the…

Does storage matter short term? If my utility runs a gas generator, wind and solar allow it to run at some fraction of its capacity most of the time. Sure, overnight when there’s little wind, the gas might go full throttle. But that’s still a huge reduction in emissions if most of the time the grid is fully wind/solar.

Yes, storage matters quite a lot because electric grids burn out if supply doesn't equal demand constantly. You need the storage not only for overnight, you need it to store energy when wind and solar are overproducing relative to current demand and you need it to supply that stored energy when wind and solar are underproducing if you expect the grid to get rid of demand resources like coal and especially natural gas.

another unmentioned cost of especially wind, but also to some extent solar is the huge transmission upgrade needed to support wind. It is a huge cost and it is never accounted for in the numbers when people are pushing for wind and solar (because it usually ruins the claim that wind and solar are cheaper over their lifecycle vs natural gas). They are also costs the consumer largely gets stuffed with via billing items outside of energy cost so it's kind of insidiously hidden from the consumer.

Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life

#293

Post by nocoiner » Sat, Jul 02, 2022, 1:24 PM UTC

dogman144 wrote: post #122

I live in one of the beautiful western states where due to the wide open spaces, wind, and carbon reliance due to lack of many of their economic options, wind farms are taking off. Up front, I get it. Wind and solar are likely a large part of how we avoid burning down the world. Without it, Climate change hits this area just as hard. That said, wind farms built to preserve the environment aren’t exactly preserving na…

I apologize if it sounds like I’m dismissing your concern, but who do you think owns the land these windmills are sitting on? Most of the time, private land owners who lease pad sites to renewable energy developers. Sometimes those landowners are local, sometimes not, but it’s not like these are going up in national parks.

Your state legislature could make it impossible or impracticable to erect these facilities. For anyone else who agrees that these are ruining the character of your community, you should start lobbying your legislators, because I promise you the landowners have been for a very long time.

Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life

#294

Post by kolinko » Sun, Jul 03, 2022, 8:06 AM UTC

rowanajmarshall wrote: post #51

macspoofing wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The cost per kWh of solar and wind is a third of natural gas and nuclear. It's not even close. So what? Or put another way, if its so cheap, why is Germany building natural gas pipelines to ship Russian gas for decades to come? What do they (and every other country) know that you don't? The reality is you're not comparing apples to apples. Natural gas can serve as base load and power a modern economy. Solar/wind can…

To be fair Germany isn't especially sunny or even _that_ windy. Somewhere like Colorado or Morocco is far more reliable for renewables. Maybe not to the point of baseload, but enough to plan for. So location is really important here.

Solar is so cheap now that even in Germany it ends up as a cheapest energy source.

Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life

#295

Post by kolinko » Sun, Jul 03, 2022, 8:08 AM UTC

macspoofing wrote: post #224

black_puppydog wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why is Germany building natural gas pipelines to ship Russian gas for decades to come? German here. Let me tell you that a lot of us have been asking the same question. :) Your argument seems to be that "they built these pipelines so that must have been a rational decision" but looking at the track record of the conservatives (Merkel's party, "in charge" for 32 out of the last 39 years), their donors, and the just…

The point is, it isn't just Germany. There is no country on Earth that actually replaced fossil fuels with wind/solar. The point with Germany is that you guys invested billions into this, and you still are building pipelines for natural gas and buying coal-derived power from your neighbors.

Wind/solar no, but Iceland is running 100% geothermal - granted it won’t scale to other countries.