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Comment by sir_bearington | Hacker News Reader

Nobody was under any impression that decarbonizing the energy sector would cost more than continuing to emit carbon.

The reality is that renewables have no plan to eliminate carbon emissions that isn't contingent on a massive breakthrough in energy storage. The US currently had under 10 minutes of energy storage. Renewables offer better carbon emissions reductions on a dollar by dollar basis until they saturate the market during peak production. Then they don't help.

Sure, nuclear is more expensive but it is the only existing solution that aims to actually eliminate carbon emissions. Not just supplement fossil fuels.

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Go through Lazard's levelized cost of energy storage slides. We're currently hitting the tipping point where renewables + storage wins based on pure $ without subsidy.

It's completely disingenuous to claim that nuclear is the only solution that aims to eliminate CO2 emissions.

And what form of storage are you using? There's only 20 minutes of storage available via lithium ion batteries with current mining methods. Others like hydroelectric are geographically dependent, and are large concrete and earth moving projects much like nuclear plants.

Lazard uses current commercial cost figures. If people actually tri d to deploy grid storage on a wide scale, prices would skyrocket as supply fails to match demand.

The sweet spot in most models is a mix of hydro, batteries, and H2.

While scaling up the industry isn't trivial, it's absurd to claim it's impossible or that demand outpacing supply will somehow reduce investment in greater supply.

Well let's hear it then. What is the mix? How many GWh of each storage type are we going to use? Typically plans for renewables + storage assumes some magical silver bullet like hydrogen or thermal storage that will make storage nearly free. Except neither of those have actually seen commercial deployment so they're no telling if they'll actually pan out.

You haven't actually given a plan to provision this much storage - or even specified how much storage we'll need for that matter - so yeah I'm still very comfortable in claiming it is not possible. At least not without some massive breakthrough in storage technology, which doesn't yet exist.

Hydrogen could achieve something like 84.8 PWh: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/06/16/hydrogen-storage-in-s...

While it's unlikely to reach this value, it's such a high figure that actually can solve the energy storage problem altogether.

If someone actually finds a way to make a feasible storage solution from it. Nobody is installing hydrogen energy storage right now.

Again, the answer is point to an unproven form of storage and assume it'll be a silver bullet.

It's underground salt caverns. This is extremely feasible and has been done for decades with natural gas.

How many Gigawatt hours of underground H2 storage are currently deployed? What company can I call to install 1 GWh of hydrogen storage?

It's been done for decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_hydrogen_storage

It's pretty well-established tech at this point.

Ah, the good old "if it hasn't happened yet it can't happen" argument.

I'll come back at you: what technological component involved in underground storage of hydrogen is not already demonstrated?

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