Comment by KirinDave | Hacker News Reader

Comment by KirinDave | Hacker News Reader

So just some basics out of the way:

1. Yes, this is good. They should do this and 2. coal is an awful and inefficient power source with lots of carbon emission which is bad. 3. the way we harvest coal is deleterious to humans and bad for the environment even if we ignore carbon. It's an ancient technology we should leave in the dustbin of history next to lead piping.

The challenge of wind turbines is that they're actually fantastically plastic hungry things. While inexpensive in their current state, we need to heavily invest in more sustainable turbine blade options that don't contribute to our other problems (carbon emission in plastics manufacturing and huge unrecyclable and toxic wind turbine blades). [0]

Folks concerned about consistency and peak load shouldn't be. We're making huge strides in energy storage (with sodium ion batteries removing our reliance on lithium[1]) and Gallium Arsenide greatly reducing the cost and size of electrical components while increasing their heat tolerance [2]). Essentially what's left here is tooling and contracts and for dinosaur energy providers to be displaced by newer options.

[0]: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2019/06/wooden-wind-turbines...

[1]: https://phys.org/news/2019-02-sodium-lithium-boost-sodium-io...

[2]: https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/GaN-replace-silicon-ap...

To add, I see down at the bottom people fighting over "consistency".

Wind power is almost always producing something. This production can be statistically modeled. Thus, you can overprovision wind and say that on average, your target of <x> MW is met or exceeded <y> percent of the time. So wind, if planned well, doesn't really need big storage.

Baseload generation is also a fallacy. It only matters that demand is met. Wind has already become the "baseload" in the UK in that wind operators always undercut everyone else on the market, thus displacing other generation.

Baseload demand is the point which demand never falls below. Back in the age of coal, it made sense to meet this baseload demand with large baseload plants, that were big and did not change output and gained economies of scale.

One challenge that I think people overlook in the shift to renewables is grid frequency stability. Big thermal plants have heavy rotors that have a lot of inertia, stopping the grid frequency from changing too quickly in an imbalance. Replace these with inertia-less wind and solar, and you will need another solution for grid stability.

>> Wind has already become the "baseload" in the UK

Give me another place in Europe where Wind is more abundant than UK ?

https://globalwindatlas.info/

Putting wind mills in Greenland and Arctic may produce a whole lot but bringing it to population centers is an issue.

Base load is a bitch, UK is the best case scenario enjoy it.

Solar may not have inertia, but wind turbines certainly do. It's hard to imagine one of those stopping on a dime.

Smaller batter installations can also help with frequency stabilization. The Tesla installation in South Aus primarily serves the purpose of grid stabilization rather than bulk storage, for example. I think solar needs that stabilization and storage more than wind, it's probably important to have a diversity of sources and locations with renewables to keep any one source from having too large an immediate impact on the grid.

You're absolutely right about baseload being a fallacy. I would argue that balancing the grid is probably an easier problem in the absence of big constant baseload generators like nuclear, than with them.

With renewables providing baseload generation, there is more capacity for variable renewable sources; if these can be sufficiently decorrelated (by geography, type of source, even design of e.g. turbines) then they would have a high likelihood of averaging out to support baseload needs while having greater backbench dispatchable capacity at play. You might only need to overprovision by (making up numbers here) 1.5x rather than 4x to have sufficient dispatchable capacity than if you combined say, nuclear baseload with renewable peaking. The aggregate effect of this would be making the renewable sources cheaper per nameplate Wattage.

Frequency stability was discussed recently in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20973513

The wind farm tripped unexpectedly easily .. but apparently this can be solved with a software update. As and when we start rolling out batteries they are excellent for frequency response, and are already getting paid for that purpose in some places.

That's a joke. There's so many things we should worry about before "unrecyclable and toxic wind turbine blades" become a major issue. It's such a tiny problem even next plastic shopping bags or water bottles. Everything has some drawbacks, but this is so far down the list it's not even worth thinking about.

Given my obvious enthusiasm for the project in hand, I'm not sure why you're so negative about discussing some of the challenges they face.

People (including me) worry all the time about things that are actually a very small issue compared to all the really huge issues they're ignoring. We have finite attention and resources, so getting caught up on the unimportant details like this is a form of bike-shedding and a personal pet-peeve of mine. It doesn't just waste time, but detracts from the more important concerns. And it trips me up personally all the time.

I think you're wrong. I'm a huge fan of green tech but its precisely your "talking about where progress needs to be made is bikeshedding" attitude that set so many people off, and justifiably get a reputation of shouting people down for not being visibly loyal.

Your performative loyalty isn't going to build a better future. Relentless progress will.

I'm not shouting anyone down, I'm merely pointing out that even discussing fixing a small leak in a ship when there's a hundred cannonball sized holes punched through it is dangerously distracting from the real task at hand. That's objectively, practically true for everyone who does not have the job of designing or procuring wind turbine blades. If that happens to be your job, then by all means consider the consequences.

You're merely ignoring all the content and asking how someone could even dream of asking about sustainability when it's so profitable to proceed right now with the status quo.

I've heard this line before. We don't have the luxury of picking and choosing our problems anymore.

You're straw-manning my argument. Worrying about how easy it is to recycle of windmill blades is akin to worrying about how to recycle oil tankers. Not completely irrelevant, but so close as to be a joke.

The point I'm trying to make here is that wind turbines are so much better than the status quo, which is quite literally killing us, that it's not worth fretting over one of their smallest drawbacks. They have much larger drawbacks to address first. Fretting over the little things takes your limited attention away from more important things and you end up worse off overall. That's a (my) philosophy for life in general, and I stand by it.

>> Folks concerned about consistency and peak load shouldn't be. We're making huge strides in energy storage

Solar peaks around noon 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm (I am being charitable here) do we have solid storage that would hold this generated power for delivery from (4:00 pm - 7:00 pm) peak ?

That 4 to 6 hour storage window is still a big issue - if you are talking about Sodium batteries we are a decade or more away from them to be grid scale!

(The reference [1] article still suggests it is in labs not in production)

> Solar peaks around noon 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm (I am being charitable here) do we have solid storage that would hold this generated power for delivery from (4:00 pm - 7:00 pm) peak ?

In limited deployment? Yes, absolutely. Sodium batteries make this proposition cheaper. You could make your house entirely off-grid and run-off-storage if your local production options are good.

> That 4 to 6 hour storage window is still a big issue - if you are talking about Sodium batteries we are a decade or more away from them to be grid scale!

No, we're not 10 years away from using sodium ions batteried at this scale. The bulk scale problem is MUCH easier than the micro-scale package problem. Ongoing work on sodium ion batteries will be to work on equivalent package competitors for lithium ion polymer batteries, which still have unparalleled density.

For less robust, large packages the work is done, the compound required is done. We already use old and inefficient batteries in these applications. It's one of Tesla's major business models and why they take your battery pack back from you at the end of life of the car.

Realistically it's not so much "stored" as "used to displace CCGT generation". The solar peak in the UK, from my own measurements is not so much "middle of the day" as "middle of the year". The seasonal variation is pretty huge up here in the northern latitudes.

Have a click about on https://flatline.org.uk/daystats.html - the best case is getting over 50% of the generation from 9AM to 6PM. The worst case is getting almost nothing for three months in the winter.

We do have solid storage technology, deployed in the field at smaller scales around ~100MWh, with many GWh installations planned soon: lithium ion:

For example, this recent LA contract got lots of press:

https://boingboing.net/2019/09/14/green-keynes.html

The technology is not hard or mysterious for storing during the daily cycle, it's just a matter of costs falling. And costs are falling dramatically.

The bigger question is what we may do for seasonal storage, or if instead of seasonal storage we just have capacity for 200% of generation and overproduce for much of the year.

This is the argument about renewables as far as I'm concerned.

Even if there was no such thing as climate change, long-term we still need to eventually move to renewables.

We have all the non-renewables as the fuel to do so. We can't continue to waste them - once they are gone, you can't bootstrap a renewable energy system.

Another aspect of turbines is that they are huge steel towers. How is steel made? With fossil fuel and fossil-fuel electricity, in places like China or the Midwestern USA which are, at best, less than 20% clean grid. So, even though we desperately need renewables, it is a sad reality that fossil fuels will aid in producing said renewables.

It's unavoidable that fossil fuels will be needed to spin-up the infrastructure of a total clean global economy. However, there's no better use that fossil fuels can be put to than preparing the ground for totally clean and abundant energy.

However, it's most certainly feasible to make steel without fossil fuels. In the US, many newer iron makers use Direct Reduction of Iron in furnaces fed with CO and H produced from natural gas (and then this DRI product is refined electrically in electric arc furnaces at so-called "Mini Mills" which are not so mini). There's no reason you couldn't just use hydrogen directly produced via electrolysis instead.

...and power-to-gas is also feasible (although approximately twice as expensive to produce per unit energy as electrolytic hydrogen is). And with that synthesized gas, you can also produce any kind of petroleum-derived product via Fischer-Tropsch, including graphite and coke and the resins needed for wind turbine blades. And all these products would be higher purity than those produced from fossil fuels (although the price WILL be higher).

So let's not let perfect be the enemy of the good. Let's transition now as soon as possible whatever we can. And that means off-shore wind.

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