Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

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This might sound cheeky, but it's a serious question: Where do you get this idea from?

There seems to be a lot of people who are strongly pro-nuclear primarily because they're pessimistic about renewables.

Whereas from my perspective, renewable tech is doing well enough that I consider climate change to be purely a political problem now.

Unfortunately that same politics has generated an absurd amount of informational chaff. There's multiple layers: climate change is a hoax, it's just cycles, it's actually beneficial, it won't be that bad, solar is a net waste of energy, you can't run a grid on more than 30% renewable and so on and so on.

It seems to me that the people that are enthusiastic about nuclear are coming from that same information bubble, possibly via American libertarianism, where they've been exposed to anti-renewable propaganda for years. They probably have internalized lots of misconceptions as a result. It's just that being vocally pro nuclear is a bit more of a rational and socially acceptable position to take than most of the other propaganda so as long as they stick to that it's hard to tell.

However, it's still wrong. I don't consider myself anti-nuclear, but it's just not the most cost effective way to generate low carbon energy. And that rollout of cheaper options would happen slightly faster if people like yourself (and Bill Gates) stopped acting like it was some impossible pipe dream and that we need to wait for nuclear to save us.

Renewables are great, but not deployed nearly quick enough: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption

Not an expert, but right now I only believe in solar geo-engineering. And, of course, never buying a waterfront property, since at this point we'll almost certainly go above 2*C.

PS. It's fascinating to see Miami real estate prices completely ignoring the incoming doom: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MIXRNSA

Hydro is mostly built out. Scalable storage isn't proven. How does renewable replace base load?

This seems an unpopular opinion, but maybe we don't need more base load. Maybe we need more on availability load. With all the magic of connected devices, they could cope with varying electricity?

Hearing, maybe refrigeration, in future electric car charging. Beyond that doesn't most load require consistent power?

Heating + cooling must be the largest consumers. And these are great candidates for "layered" service.

Of US Commercial electricity use about 40% is refrigeration, cooling, heating, and ventilation which can all time shifted at least intra-day with good building practices.

10% is lighting which realistically can't - you need lights when it's dark.

15% is computers which can sort of load shift because most office computers are now laptops - with good communications systems you can tell laptops how aggressively to charge / whether to run off battery.

The rest is "other" quite a lot of which is small electronic devices like tablets and phones charging and then a grab-bag of misc. stuff.

Half of residential electricity is some kind of temperature shifting (heating, cooling, refrigeration, freezers, ventilation).

Essentially with good insulation you can get to a point where you can load shift 50%+ of your electricity consumption on an intra-day basis.

Electric car charging of course is a perfect load to match to renewables as well.

That doesn't solve the issue of inter-day fluctuations - what happens when you have a cloudy, high pressure system sitting over a substantial part of your generation for a week - but it does mean that we can go pretty far. We may have to keep more open-cycle gas around for those times which will have to be funded on a capacity basis.

> ...most office computers are now laptops...

Maybe in SV but not elsewhere. Plus servers that run 24x7 are probably the bulk of that 15%.

"with good building practices", "get to a point" this is planning an ideal future despite having a system where the legacy infrastructure very much still needs to be accommodated for. We can't disregard what already exists, and that involves a considerable amount of base load.

Or you can view vanishing base load as an "incentive" and view solutions pop up. I'm more in the "bring more popcorn" camp.

1) We don't yet have enough renewables for this to be an issue. Even with the most optimistic possible build-out timelines for additional renewable generation, we will not do so for another decade or two. That's why it's important to change building practices for new-build and refurbs now since the incremental cost for additional insulation is much less than the cost of retro-fitting.

2) "base load" isn't the best term here. Base load refers to the load that makes up the bottom of the load curve, basically a straight horizontal line right under the trough in demand. Some of base load actually is flexible load - for instance refrigeration equipment that runs overnight can be timeshifted by an hour easily (although in that case it is rarely done because power prices are cheap at that time). The problem for renewables is not base load but non-flexible / non-dispatchable load that must go on when requested such as lights or televisions.

Renewables meet the traditional concept of base load while generation is sufficient. This can be the situation often, or just occasionally depending on how many wind and solar facilities are present.

Renewable oversupply can already be economically stored for daily cycle purposes with 4 to 8 hour battery banks. If longer term storage is not developed, biomatter and synthetic fuels can run thermo-electric generators on the occasions that renewable supply falls short of demand.

"baseload" is another shibboleth that suggests you're coming from some other information bubble, where that phrase has much more meaning.

I have no problem imagining renewable and storage taking care of baseload. Seasonal storage and winter peaks in cold climates and long distance flight are interesting problems. But meeting the baseload more economically than coal, gas or nuclear? Just roll out more of the tech we already have and which is already saving us money as we roll it out at smaller scales. Every small battery that replaces a horrendously expensive gas peaker plant is one step closer to the goal and generates savings we can spend on the next step.

Why throw all the eggs into one basket? There is plenty of work to be done rolling out both and plenty of people to do the work.

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