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Comment by redisman | Hacker News Reader

They have a lot of money to invest and they could also export solar if they want to stay in the energy business. Lots of sunlight there.

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> they could also export solar

I remember an old discussion about this. The main problem is that transmission lines to potential customers would have to traverse unfriendly countries.

Power-to-gas* might become their salvation.

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-gas

There are already plans for massive investment in a hydrogen production plant - though obviously there are still lots of issues to be solved with that energy pipeline.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201112-the-green-hydrog...

Export to whom? Everybody else in the vicinity also has a lot of sunlight. Why wouldn't they make their own power at home and save on transmission costs?

To Europe. In the form of hydrogen, ammonia or other chemical energy storages.

Europe will need lots of those. It can very likely not be produced in Europe alone.

I don't see why not. Renewables already means periodic negative power prices for most countries that have them. They will likely use this electricity to make these chemicals closer to where they are needed. This is already happening with aluminum in, e.g. Germany.

Even if they don't, 1/3 of the countries in the world are drenched in sunlight. The competition will make margins on these industries pretty pitiful.

Negative power prices are only possible because there are other resources to provide the production baseline. As there exists no system to store power at scale, production must match exactly consumption at any time; so when the wind blows or the sun shines and there is no demand, the generated power is basically worthless.

But this is only possible because renewables represent only a small fraction of all power in most places. They can at peak generate a significant amount of power, but overall most produced TWh come from other sources.

I foresee -ve prices becoming more common. Overproduction is a cheap way of dealing with the variability of a source that is 2-3x cheaper than others even if it ends up not being used or if some is wasted (e.g. wind turbines that are left turned off when it's very windy and grid demand is low).

If that overproduction can be channeled into e.g. hydrogen production which can be used for airline fuel or heating homes or for topping up the grid when it's not windy or sunny all the better.

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