Hacker News Reader

Comment by _Microft | Hacker News Reader

Why would people have to go without power if there is no sun at their place? We do not go hungry either when there was a bad harvest in our area. We just transport goods in from where they can be produced.

Intermittency is only a problem when one has a medieval image of self-sufficiency in mind. Solutions are either averaging out peaks and dips temporally (by storing energy e.g. in pumped hydro plants, in batteries, ...) or geographically by moving power where it is needed and from where it is currently being produced. You do not even lose gigantic fractions of the power in the process: high-voltage direct current power lines have losses of around 3%/1000km. China, for example, has power lines that move a dozen gigawatt over a distance of over 3000km. It can be done.

View on HN

What are the security implications of a total abandonment of regional self-sufficiency?

What's your concept of regional here?

For physical goods, we have ditched self-sufficiency a long time ago. Your government might sustain emergency reserves for grain, food or oil and gas but even that lasts only a few weeks. Here is what Germany has stockpiled for emergencies for example: [0][1][2].

Mutual dependency does not have to be a bad thing either. It keeps both sides from doing stupid things (assuming a balanced level of dependency in both directions).

[0] (german) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundesreserve_Getreide [1] (german) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zivile_Notfallreserve [2] (german) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategische_%C3%96lreserve

Yes, but i think you don't have the orders of magnitude here. The image showed in the article [0] doesn't separate the different energi use making it look like the NRE have more impact that they really have. You might want to look a that instead [1]. In reality solar accounted for less than a percent of used power in 2016.

From wikipedia [2]:

```Worldwide growth of photovoltaics is extremely dynamic and varies strongly by country. As of 2020, there are at least 37 countries around the world with a cumulative PV capacity of more than one gigawatt. By the end of 2019, a cumulative amount of 629 GW of solar power was installed throughout the world.[2] By early 2020, the leading country for solar power was China with 208 GW,[3][4] accounting for one-third of global installed solar capacity. By the end of 2016, cumulative photovoltaic capacity increased by more than 75 gigawatt (GW) and reached at least 303 GW, sufficient to supply approximately 1.8 percent of the world's total electricity consumption.```

So the installed power in 2016 is at least 303 GW. Let's check how much it produce (and btw, solar is not like wind or water and can't easely be disconnected from the grid, at least for large solar farms, so broadly: solar power generated = solar power used).

According by ourworldindata [3], 328.2 TWh in 2016 and 724 in 2019, so it roughly double every two years. That's the good news.

And the cost have nothing to do with this. The bottlneck is twofold: the installation (peopl trained to instal the solar panels as well as the land usage, and the other one is the production. That can keep doubling every other year, but one thing won't, and that the mines. The growth decline already started for wind power generation because of the first bottleneck (the demand don't follow the offers), i'm afraid the second one will limit the solar panel usage.

I've read that installed solar was 3% of installed electricity in 2019, so roughly .3% of electricity used. Electricity generation is 1/3 of our GHG emissions, and we need to limit those to 0 by 2050, or at least by 2070. This is not hte way. It will help, but this is not the way.

[0] https://www.carbonbrief.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Scree...

[1] https://www.c2es.org/site/assets/uploads/2017/10/estimated-r...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country

[3] https://ourworldindata.org/renewable-energy

> This is not the way. It will help, but this is not the way.

There is no this way (i.e. no 'silver bullet') to fix the climate crisis. If we want to tackle the problem, there will only be lots of smaller it will helps that - in total - will make a difference then.

You'd think that if this was an easily solvable problem, the great engineering nation of Germany would've solved it, instead of just firing up the coal plants.

To store just a fraction of the needed power would require millions of large expensive batteries, whereas pumped hydro storage requires geological features that are in limited supply.

Once you factor in all these costs, suddenly the "cheapest electricity in history" becomes really expensive.

Well, the great engineering nation of Germany brought us the Dieselgate.

That’s not an argument. Germany’s industry doesn’t exclusively consist of Volkswagen.

No country has solved large scale energy storage that would be needed for storing electric energy in the range of TWh.

None.

Because there is no incentive. The current political incentive in Germany is to keep the existing fossil fuel power plants running for as long as possible to avoid investments that could ruin the "Schwarze Null" (the government's "no new debt" policy).

Political issues: the coal lobby is strong in Germany despite its "green" image.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com