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Comment by 8bitsrule | Hacker News Reader

The sad part is that it would have been cheaper for decades ... had someone been willing to make that move. Big windmills had been built by the 1880s (e.g. Charles Brush), and a century later the technology was well within reach. But 'alternative energy' (as it was known) couldn't get heard about (Carter tried).

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There are technologies that have just not been ready until relatively recently.

Design, material, manufacture, deployment and operation of very large blades is both critical and hard.

A key operating constraint is keeping blade-tips below the speed of sound. To design the monsters that are currently being deployed, computer modelling would not have been adequate even fifteen years ago.

Similarly, carbon fiber is finally getting scale economies from more than one industry. But it couldn't have been cost effective in the 1970s.

How important are batteries to windmill success? Good batteries are very recent.

Not very important as long as you have a good power grid and some other form of backup power.

Geographic batteries (potential energy sinks, eg storing water in a reservoir at a higher altitude and releasing it through turbines to a lower one) have operated for decades.

Dinorwig in Wales operates a 9GWh capacity at 1.7GW. Far from insignificant, much cheaper (and safer) than the equivalent lithium cells.

https://youtu.be/6Jx_bJgIFhI

To be clear, Dinorwig is not only powered by green methods, but it could.

There's quite a few large working ones: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydro... It looks like 60s/70s were pretty good for building initial low-capacity ones.

Now it looks like the plans for new ones are entirely dominated by China. (Or were projects in other countries just not researched/included?)

The less favourable the existing geography, the harder it will be for a state to "just" build a pumped storage facility like Dinorwig. Dinorwig is basically ideal, the mountain was already right there, with a nice lake at the bottom and a quarry that had closed or was about to close that could be re-used as the top lake. It's far enough away to reduce the amount of random BANANAs‡ who get involved yet not so far as to make the infrastructure cost prohibitive (for HV power lines to the facility). The UK hasn't built lots more because it doesn't have dozens of other mountains with lakes next to them just kicking about for the work, and any it does have are deemed environmentally important (e.g. something rare lives in the lake or on the mountain).

China has two advantages: One it's fucking enormous, there are bound to be places with mountain lakes that weren't needed for anything else more important. Two under an authoritarian government there's no prospect of protest against the plan even if it's catastrophic for some groups.

‡ NIMBYs but more so, Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone.

> Far from insignificant, much cheaper (and safer) than the equivalent lithium cells.

Pumped storage "batteries" have one disadvantage though, they are nowhere near as reactive as solid-state batteries can be - think of milliseconds instead of dozens of seconds.

You can chain in a relatively small lithium battery to smooth load.

That's true, but power grids have managed to track demand with production that reacts over dozens of minutes.

There is a chart in the article that suggests the price competitiveness is a new development, circa 2013.

I imagine GP's point was that economy of scale is the key, and had people actually listened earlier, the technology was there, it just needed the scale.

We may as well complain that the Egyptian Middle Kingdom's 12 Dynasty didn't properly formulate Euler's formula in 1991 BC. Nobody at the time made it happen so it didn't happen and the same could be said of any improvement.

> Nobody at the time made it happen so it didn't happen and the same could be said of any improvement.

Not in this case. These particular improvements were held back intentionally by megacorporations like Exxon, who spent billions telling lies to the US government, to American people and the rest of the world. Huge efforts were undertaken to ensure that this kind of technology - renewable through wind and solar - would not take off as quickly as it naturally would otherwise.

The 'free market' only works at setting prices if the market knows the risks. In this case, the market not only had the risks actively hidden from them, but they were directly lied to about the risks.

If the market had understood the risks of this technology in accordance with basic economic understanding (which is obviously flawed but hear me out), then renewable energy would have been cheaper than non-renewable energy a long time ago.

That's not to mention the direct oil subsidies provided by the US and Canadian (and other) governments over the last many decades.

2013 was 6 years ago.

Meanwhile, I am confident that the point wind energy becomes cheaper than fossil energy was within reach much earlier than that. Note that without peer-reviewed research - which I am not providing here - this is just my opinion. But I hope it counts.

This is not quite true. There have been required advances in materials science over the last decades that are needed to maintain the size/strength:weight ratios/etc. The larger the wind blade the more efficient.

Those required advances would have materialized -much- sooner if windpower had been taken seriously and some (let's say) 500Kw mills had appeared on the market. I recall Reagan having Carter's White-House-rooftop solar removed. Anything green was mocked as a 'utopian dream' or whatever, and the established industry spent -a lot- of money keeping it that way.

These days, when the alumni mag from my school arrives, I have to ruefully smile about all of the 'green language' in it, now that it's trendy. What a damn shame.

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