Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A near 100% renewables grid is well within reach, and with little storage

reneweconomy.com.au

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 365 posts

Re: A near 100% renewables grid is well within reach, and with little storage

#71

Post by kkfx »

atoav wrote: post #32
philipkglass wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what is different about this new study. It uses real time supply/demand figures instead of annualized averages. It meets 98.8% of demand with renewables and fills in with fossil power the rest of the time. To quote from the article: Key results from the 52 weeks of simulations are summarised as follows: - Renewables met 98.8% of demand over the year, with the remaining 1.2% met by ‘Other’ (fossils) - ‘Other’ g…

> 82% of demand was directly powered by wind and solar without having to pass through storage or be curtailed. This is amazing. As an EE I wonder about transportation losses, but wind and solar should be pretty easy to decentralize, so maybe this is a non-issue. Wind might be a little harder to decentralize, but I don't know how the regional differences are in Australia. I'd suspect the coasts (or even offshore) woul…

Didn't you wonder about the stability of such grid considering the timeframe inverters take to adjust their output on load or production changes? Wind can also consume energy, solar can just cut off and our electricity grids all other the world are not DC, for various significant and good reasons.

Re: A near 100% renewables grid is well within reach, and with little storage

#72

Post by themitigating »

itsoktocry wrote: post #61
malfist wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

> Ah yes, let's point the finger at California and ignore the one state... Wow, this comment is so indicative of modern discourse. The parent makes an off-hand reference about a state where brown outs have been an issue, (Democratic) California, and you feel the need to jump in with "WHY ARE YOU IGNORING (Repulican) Texas???" as if there's some political motivation behind an innocuous statement of fact.

Why did the parent make the off hand reference?

Republicans know if they keep repeating such remarks (or accusations) it will eventually will just be accepted as fact without requiring evidence because people hear it from so many different people over long periods of time.

They don't lie either, they just bring to attention a problem in a blue state or with a company considered to be liberal" and ignore similar issues elsewhere. T

Here's how it works with another example:

If you were to go to someone and ask "What city has the highest rate of car theft in 2022" they would probably say NYC or LA when in reality, it's Odessa TX (btw Republican mayor). This shows how this manipulation tactic works, it's based on exaggeration, stereotypes, and constantly streaming information.

Finally, they can then say, "don't vote for Democrats otherwise you'll end up like X city/state that has Y problem".

Re: A near 100% renewables grid is well within reach, and with little storage

#73

Post by colechristensen »

If you lower this to, say, 75%, a good analysis will show that a renewables grid with zero storage is possible around the world.

Storage is only required for the last n% and n is much larger than most people realize. If we accept that the energy economy will shift with supply-and-demand based pricing, what can actually happen is having peak production oversupply which will find users with its lower prices enabling off-peak-production to be high enough to meet peak demand. (this is a kind of thing that maybe needs blog posts with graphs to make the most sense)

We would be in a very much better place if we were near n and it's probably not worth worrying that much yet because n is also quite far away.

Re: A near 100% renewables grid is well within reach, and with little storage

#74

Post by kkfx »

mattnewton wrote: post #55

Meanwhile in the US, we have states allowing counties to ban solar and wind energy production specifically on privately owned and industrially zoned land. I hope Australia can push through the fossil fuel lobby as they start to fight harder. https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2022/08/23/nine-ohio-counties...

If you want to play that game here (France) we can made DIY p.v. systems, pass a consuel (third party organism for electrical safety) check and connect it to the grid BUT with only two mode, one is pure-self consumption you might just have few over-voltage rejects to the grid, the other is gifting the grid of your surplus and in this case you do not only give energy for free, energy consumed by some neighbor who pay it to the grid, full price, but you also have to pay "energy transports fee" to the grid handler. You pay to gift something that get sold at full price. That's is.

Re: A near 100% renewables grid is well within reach, and with little storage

#75

Post by smm11 »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #69
thayne wrote: post #57

"in Australia" is an important qualification here. Australia has a very high ratio of available solar and wind energy to population. Not that getting Australia fully on renewables wouldn't be exciting. But it is definitely an easier target than say the US.

Quite a lot of people live in Texas and California where renewables are already pretty advanced, plus there's nuclear in the north, and they have hydro and grid connections with Canada who have even more hydro and nuclear so the USA should be easier. The US intends to hit this target (i.e. 95% carbon-free generation) in 8 years I think, with 100% and wider electrification of current fossil fuel uses in 2035 and it di…

I read somewhere that it's the storage/distribution part that's hurting California. Can't go full-throttle without disaster. If the storage/distribution part was worked out, CA would be full renewable tomorrow.

Re: A near 100% renewables grid is well within reach, and with little storage

#76

Post by kkfx »

snek_case wrote: post #48
wyager wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transmission losses would eat any benefit, unfortunately. Of course, the author didn't model this at all. This is the problem with 99% of "actually we could totally rip out our entire infrastructure right now" posts - it's usually justified with crappy modeling that falls apart under slightly more scrutinizing consideration. Solar-only with low storage overhead might become more viable if we get room-temperature supe…

I see a lot of cynicism around renewable energy and electric cars and I frankly don't get it. The typical cynical approach is to point out one potential problem, and dismiss the entire solution as if it was worthless, which is obviously false. As others have pointed out, there are now HVDC lines that can go over thousands of kilometers (transcontinental scale!) with reasonable losses. There's no reason to believe tha…

Did you consider how strategical targets became such networks? How much geopolitics nightmares they represent?

Re: A near 100% renewables grid is well within reach, and with little storage

#79

Post by nicoburns »

cbhl wrote: post #70

Do we actually have effective strategies for dealing with significant over-generation? The author glosses over it as being necessary to get to 98% renewables throughout the year ("we'll just run our hydro dams in reverse"), but I'm under the impression that over-generation that is unhandled leads to grid instability/desync.

I think wind and solar can simply be turned off if need be.

Re: A near 100% renewables grid is well within reach, and with little storage

#80

Post by ZeroGravitas »

smm11 wrote: post #75
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite a lot of people live in Texas and California where renewables are already pretty advanced, plus there's nuclear in the north, and they have hydro and grid connections with Canada who have even more hydro and nuclear so the USA should be easier. The US intends to hit this target (i.e. 95% carbon-free generation) in 8 years I think, with 100% and wider electrification of current fossil fuel uses in 2035 and it di…

I read somewhere that it's the storage/distribution part that's hurting California. Can't go full-throttle without disaster. If the storage/distribution part was worked out, CA would be full renewable tomorrow.

California has a massive battery/solar rollout pipeline, and again that's before the IRA stuff, which lets you get incentives for batteries that aren't part of a solar/wind project, which can be used to fix transmission issues as wel as just being storage, so they'll be fine.
Post reply on HN