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Comment by batmansmk | Hacker News Reader

Don't get fooled by simple price comparison. It's comparing apples and oranges. Gas, nuclear, coal, reversible dams, geothermy... are all controllable energy sources: they produce when we need it. Wind and solar are intermittent.

Equip fully the world with solar and wind and the trains will have to leave their stations when the wind blows and not at any other moment.

What's happening is that countries migrating towards wind turbines like Germany also adds coal plant to the same capacity in order to compensate for when the wind doesn't blow. For each GW of wind one can find a GW of coal or gas being installed.

Then, if we are talking about adding batteries into the mix to make it work, solar and wind become far from carbon neutral, and endangers us way more than nuclear.

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I suspect that if variable electricity pricing for consumers, a great deal of the need for "batteries" will evaporate. Heavy consumer electric uses (charging the car, HVAC, hot water) can easily be time shifted. It isn't time shifted today because consumer electricity rates are constant 24/7.

The price for electricity already varies hour by hour. Maybe not as much as solar would, but most people (including me) are not paying a pegged price for electricity 24/7.

Not in the Pacific Northwest (Puget Power).

Also, to make this work best, appliances need to be connected to the internet and the power companies need to have an internet ABI where the current power price can be extracted by those appliances.

At last, an actual use for internet connected appliances!

Pacific Power (Oregon) also has fixed rates.

I don't think forcing people to use electricity only when it's available is a practical solution to the availability problem with wind and solar.

Not forcing... just having market forces encourage good behavior, instead of hiding the underlying cost pressures from them.

Look at it this way. With enough variation over the day, you create a market for storage. Let's say stored electricity costs twice as much as direct, but the price of direct varies by 3x over the course of the day. You've now created an arbitrage market for buying cheap electricity during the day, and selling it at night.

Of course, the more storage gets built, the more the load (and thus cost) increases during the high-availability times, and the lower the selling price during demand spikes. And thus the market attains equilibrium.

The law of supply and demand is a marvelous thing sometimes.

I understand your point, but GP is talking about avoiding the need for batteries by pricing people out of the market instead. If you're not using batteries, supply during dark or windless hours is inelastic, because there's nothing being generated - in other words you're not solving the problem and you can't really charge anyone anyway because there's nothing to deliver.

> GP is talking about avoiding the need for batteries by pricing people out of the market instead.

Nope, I talked about incentivizing consumers to shift their demand based on a volatile price. I pointed out that much of this can be accomplished without need of batteries.

For example, have the hot water tank heat up water higher than normal when electricity is cheaper, and lower when electricity is more expensive. Hot water tanks lose heat very slowly, this could result in never needing to heat water during the expensive times.

It's a heluva lot cheaper than having a battery do it.

The water in the tank is functioning as a battery in that case.

Yes, of course.

"Windless" is greatly overrated, for two reasons. First, utility-scale wind is built hundreds of feet in the air, not on the ground. Wind is much steadier there. And it's built in carefully selected locations for steady behavior.

Second, it's not a single location. Wind may be lower in one location, but strong in another location 50 miles away. The idea that wind goes completely dead all at once across statewide areas is not how wind actually works.

"The idea that wind goes completely dead all at once across statewide areas is not how wind actually works."

The idea that wind currents are uncorrelated across geographical areas, even on the scale of states, is not how wind actually works.

> HVAC

Yes, the demand for HVAC is very high when the winds are low.

While there is already variable pricing (Time-of-use) in some jurisdictions, I don't think that's what you're thinking of. "Transactive Energy" is more towards the concept of running the distribution system as a market akin to the transmission system. The company I work for has deployed a pilot program of this concept in New York. https://www.opusonesolutions.com/news/national-grid-launches...

Electricity price is already adapted hour per hour on the European Market. When the wind blows in Germany, price sometimes even go negative: it costs operationally less to energy producers to pay people to use the energy than stopping equipment. No change has been noted on the electricity usage.

Electricity bill is on average $100 per household per month. People won't shift their usage because electricity is too cheap anyway. 1.6% of your revenue === 1.6% of your saving effort.

Note that the periodicity of wind blowing is days and weeks, so it's too long and too intermittent to align daily routines on it. Forget about charging your car or hot water aligned on it, the only solution we have scaled to use this wind energy is reversible dams / potential energy, and of that we have no more unexploited geography to support wind turbines. Feb 2019 we produced in Germany 10,000GWh with wind versus 3,000GWh in July 2019. And between 2 consecutive weeks, it can be a factor of x10 of difference. http://energynumbers.info/capacity-factors-at-danish-offshor...

> to align daily routines on it

That's not necessary. The utility can make the current price available via an internet API. The water heater can be connected to the internet and can read that data. Heat the water to 130 or so when electricity is cheap, heat it only to 100 or so when it is expensive. From personal experience, the water remains hot enough for a comfortable shower 3 days after the power goes out. This is more than a workable system. The hot water itself becomes the "battery".

And that's only the hot water heater. You can do it with the HVAC system (the thermal mass of the house becomes the "battery"), and with charging your car.

Right there it's a huge chunk of one's electricity consumption, all without needing grid storage batteries.

> Equip fully the world with solar and wind and the trains will have to leave their stations when the wind blows and not at any other moment.

Wind just doesn't stop blowing across the world all at once. When one place is in the doldrums, another is likely windy. With a sufficiently connected grid, a large deployment of wind turbines can smooth out production in ways smaller, regionally focused deployments cannot. I posit that a global distribution of wind power is _more_ available than a regional one, not less, as your comment seems to imply.

Gas and hydro are highly controllable, but nuclear, coal and geothermal aren't really - just in the opposite way to solar and wind.

Those sources are slow to ramp up and down - that's why the time-of-use power prices I face right now are at their lowest overnight (so I currently time shift as much load as I can to those times).

> Wind and solar are intermittent.

True, but the story is actually worse than they paint it. Electricity from renewables + storage is now cheaper than electricity from a new coal or nuclear plant. As those old plants close, they won't be replaced. https://www.abc.net.au/news/11495558

In the tussle between renewables vs fossil fuels it's all over bar the shouting, which is to say all we will have to put up with the coal and gas industry screaming how unfair it all is until the last of them die off.

But it's is just as well renewables do cost less because if someone had to plan on losing money to save the planet it would be a gonner.

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