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Comment by wcoenen | Hacker News Reader

This is not just a coal story. Natural gas prices started rising a few months earlier, which put upward pressure on other energy commodities like coal and oil.

https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/natural-gas

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Divesting of oil, coal, and natural gas is premature. We can't meet our needs with clean energy alone. Fossil fuels will still be needed for many years to come.

China needs more coal, Europe needs more natural gas. Winter is coming.

This will stay true until we start divesting from fossil fuels and investing in clean energy.

Some here appear to disagree, as if fossil fuels are taboo now. You can't say no to nuclear and fossil fuels, that's just reality for the next few decades. After mid 2030's I can see coal dying and oil dwindling like coal is now. Even if somehow everyone adopted electric cars in the next 10 years fully that still leaves giant ships, planes, trucks and so much more applications that are simply uneconomical to displace within a short time even if the replacement's value is the old use's current market value.

Fossil getting expensive long term means all those natural gas sites that covid shattered could now reopen because it is becoming profitable to take them out of ground. This benefits oil companies, but it also creates an opportunity for alternative energy conversion. Why heat houses in winter using expensive/price-unstable natural gas when solar and wind exist, except saying no to nuclear meant it can't even be used as a backup to solar/wind which they need for obvious reasons. Unless of course there is a new revolution in battery tech I don't know about

I'd say some don't like to hear the truth. But I get it. It's painful and unpleasant to hear especially when it comes to having any sort of empathy for the demise of fossil fuels and all of the related industries.

In addition to all the fossil fuel vehicles that you mentioned, you have also consider all of the industries and livelihoods as well (I'm sure you meant this implicitly). Those who work in oil-fields/sea-platforms, ICE factories, refinement equipment, and so on... If such a transition could happen over night, it would be devastating to so many industries, individuals... even entire economies and countries.

While it's difficult to have any sympathy for the incumbent/legacy/ICE car manufactures being "unable to compete" with Tesla and new wave of Chinese EV manufactures, it can't be easy for any of them to transition without significant pain. Esp with all of the incentives, laws, etc... that have set up over the last century. You have billions of dollars of oil subsidies, franchise laws, worker unions, and so on.

This where the government needs to step in. Fossil fuel subsidies need to be phased out. Training citizens with the knowledge and experience to work in these new industries needs to be provided. New incentives for manufactures to transition to sustainable methods of transportation need to be created. Old one eliminated.

Ties to and influence of lobbies associated to legacy industries and fossil fuels need to be dismantled, even if the only way to go about that is through the creation of new, more powerful and influential lobbies that represent clean and progressive alternatives. I have my doubts that Tesla would be what it is today if they had played by the book, no matter how superior their technology is.

Clean tech can't fill the void left by fossil fuels? Start promoting and evangelizing the advantages of nuclear options.

I guess my point is it's going to be painful no matter how much people fetishize clean tech. Everyone is going to suffer in one way or another, but it has to happen and it needs to start now. I know that there are things being done about it already, but it's not enough.

> Fossil fuel subsidies need to be phased out.

Fossil fuel subsidies are a social stability measure. There are going to be hard times when people can't afford fuel to heat their homes in winter, and have to endure lectures by the private-jet-to-next-climate-conference-crowd on how morally flawed they are for still affording to light up a candle at night.

There’s a pretty simple solution there: move the fossil fuel subsidies to subsidize people directly. For instance by paying the first $N of their fuel bills (where N is determined based on something like the expected required energy for the month). This way people in smaller-than-average and more energy efficient homes don’t get slammed by high prices, but they can still save even more by reducing their energy needs.

Frankly, I wonder if we will ever be completely free from fossil fuels. Renewables have a few problems that need solving.

What do you do when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing?

Storage would fix that except we don't have a storage solution that scales to the levels we need and is widely implementable yet.

What do you do if the sun decides not to shine and the wind decides not to blow for a long time? What do you do when you exhaust your energy stores?

The only thing I can think of is restarting the natural gas and coal plants. Fossil fuel plants will have to be maintained (and staffed) as a backup. Nuclear will work too I guess but same problem, maintenance and staff.

The only scenario I can see where we rely totally on renewables only is when we have a huge excess of renewable energy generation and a lot of extra energy storage such that it will buy us enough time to look for alternatives if the weather decides to go weird and deny us solar and wind power.

Power2Gas scales, it's just a bit expensive right now.

The solution to those things is long-range transmission capability and an adaptive grid. The wind is always blowing somewhere, the sun is always shining somewhere, and at least one of those somewheres will have excess in a properly built out grid.

None of that is beyond our capability, the issue is getting the will and dollars to build it. The way it's currently going we're organically building small clumps here and there where capital is available with no overall direction. That can work in the long run, but it means the build-up period will be marked with unequal outcomes by region and gluts/shortages.

Where the sun is shining/wind is blowing might be too far away. There are limits to how far we can draw power from technically, economically, and politically.

Also other regions need power too so you would be straining their supply - unless you have, again, huge excess in generation capacity.

The cost of a simple cycle gas turbine power plant is maybe 4% of the cost of a new nuclear power plant (and combined cycle just 10%), so backing up the entire grid with turbine capacity isn't that expensive. You need fuel for those turbines, but that's where hydrogen comes in.

To clarify: I meant cost per unit of rated power output.

I completley agree. Being able to designate remote arid locations for power generation and being able to transmit that power elsewhere will have a huge impact on society and the environment.

My crazy idea is high power lasers and satellites reflecting the sun (magnified beam/laser for minimal night sky disruption??) to the other side of the planet. I wish I had the right education to come up with good ideas, if it was up to me there would be arrays of satellites that convert the sun's light to laser or just a focused beam and literally boil the ocean to generate power! (Good thing there are smarter people working in these problems)

> What do you do if the sun decides not to shine and the wind decides not to blow for a long time?

I always see this argument in these kinds of discussion, but does anyone have real statistics as to how often that actually happens? And how widespread these disruptions actually are, keeping in mind that solar and wind power are often distributed over a wide area?

(Keep also in mind that, unless there's a solar eclipse, photovoltaic panels can still produce some power even when it's very cloudy, so that might not lead to a total loss of generation.)

If you need a grid that has, say, three 9s of reliability (US grid) or four 9s reliability (European grid), then it can only happen for like 15 minutes per year in Europe or 150 min per year in the US.

Now if you are only using wind for 10% of your power needs, a 10% drop in wind is not a big deal. But when you are using wind for 30% of your power needs, then the same variability becomes a bigger deal and might start to impact reliability, even though the wind itself is not more variable than before. Same for solar.

Well just last month …

https://www.wsj.com/articles/energy-prices-in-europe-hit-rec...

Renewables like solar and wind depend on the weather - which we cannot control at all. Non-renewables have dependencies too like politics and economics but at least it’s something we have some control over.

If solar and wind is to completely replace non-renewables, their intermittency is going to have to be dealt with somehow - and huge excess in generation and storage capacity is only way that comes to mind at the moment.

You can play with designing a renewable + storage system to supply "synthetic baseload" using actual historical weather data at this website:

https://model.energy/

(The handling of transmission is greatly simplified, but that's ok for what that is.)

> Frankly, I wonder if we will ever be completely free from fossil fuels.

One way or the other, this is inevitable. There's only so much fossil fuel that can be burned before the environment becomes too hostile for civilization to survive.

> What do you do if the sun decides not to shine and the wind decides not to blow for a long time? What do you do when you exhaust your energy stores?

Power2Gas gets you to 100% at a reasonable cost. Batteries act as short term storage, with most of the stored energy going through them; the gas provides long term storage and back up generation, with most of the energy storage capacity there (with a much longer average residence time). There may also be room for intermediate storage on the timescale of a week or so (pumped hydro, thermal, for example).

Multiple levels of storage like this is analogous to the cache hierarchy of a computer, in that combining different storage technologies with different properties can provide a solution that is better than any of those just by itself.

Even setting aside the environment, there is only so much oil and natural gas. IIRC, there is only enough to last through this century.

One solution: build enough nuclear to cover your nighttime load and run that 24/7, add enough solar to cover just the extra load during the day, and for remaining discrepancies with demand use either batteries or load-following by the nuclear plants, whichever is cheaper.

A while back MIT had an electric grid cost simulator online, and that was the cheapest fossil-free combination I could find.

Did the simulator include hydrogen? In many places, hydrogen reduces the cost of a 100% renewable grid, vs. just using batteries for storage.

Don't remember. Is anyone doing that in production? If so, what does it cost?

There is some underground hydrogen storage (used to smooth output to ammonia synthesis, for example), and some hydrogen pipelines (about 1000 miles in the US), and combustion turbines have been available for 30 or more years that will burn hydrogen. So all the parts are available. Electrolyzers need to be sufficiently cheap to work well with intermittent renewables, but their cost is dropping rapidly.

Integrating preexisting technologies is the easiest and surest kind of innovation, even if they haven't all been brought together yet.

There are cost estimates at the reference link at https://model.energy/ , along with projections of future costs.

> We can't meet our needs with clean energy alone.

Nuclear energy does that just fine - as a result, France is the lowest-carbon major nation.

The jury is still out. We have not gone through a handful of construction/decommission cycles of nuclear power plants, simply because the lifetime of a nuclear power plant is over half a century or more, and France started its nuclear push as late as the '70s.

The U.S. has had stagnant energy production since 2008

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...

The U.S. generates about as much energy from renewables as it does from nuclear. Combined (nuclear + renewables) only produces around 40% of the energy the U.S. consumes.

In 2008, the combined nuclear + renewable energy accounted for 29% of the energy consumed by the U.S. (green energy production is only up 100% in 10 years). Mostly there was just a swap from Coal power to Natural gas power.

Put another way, it'll be decades with no energy growth to replace the natural gas and coal energy production; baring some massive changes.

At the end of the day, renewables are not going to cut it. We need a massive increase in nuclear, it's the only clear way. If the goal is to switch off coal and natural gas (which IMO, we should just keep using coal + natural gas). Cheaper energy, is the quickest way to reduce poverty.

This argument is incoherent. Renewables did not force out existing fossil capacity on their own, so they are inferior to a nuclear plan where we do force out fossil capacity? Why not build renewables and also force out that fossil capacity?

The gas hike is mostly the outcome of Putin's squeeze onto Western Europe to adopt NS2 on his terms.

Who would of thought? Didn't some US Administration hint at this, that Russia would leverage the pipe to fuck Europe? Unfortunately the current US Administration actually gave Putin the green light to fuck the Euro poors, sad.....

Clown world....

I can think of 2 instances where Trump publicly questioned EU members' reliance on Russian energy. Once when he visited Poland and then later at a G7 summit.

Yeah, that was what I was referring to. Trump was correct, Russia will fuck the Euro Poors like it is doing now.

Biden who has dementia has no plan and basically gave Putin the green light.

You mean the US actively tries to prevent NS2? As in sanctioning companies working on it?

I just submitted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28828492

Many companies have confirmed that Gazprom actually adheres to the existing contracts and prices. Gazprom is not, however, offering short-term sales at the currently negotiated long-term prices; in other words, Gazprom is not selling gas over the counter at 1/5 the market rate.

This seems to me like one of these opportunities where some EU gov'ts are blaming Russia for something in a way that doesn't make too much sense once you look at it for more than five seconds, yet sounds superficially convincing. Things like that are always unfortunate when you could leverage more substantial criticism instead; hardly a tall order with Russia.

See e.g. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/russias-gazprom-feel...

This is a piece from TASS, written by two Russians. The golden rule of reading TASS bulletins applies now just as it did in the 20th century.

https://www.reuters.com/article/rpb-tass-connect-idUSKBN2381...

The facts are: Russia cuts off transit via Ukraine in advance of the winter to force commissioning of Baltic Sea pipeline. It's everything that East Europeans were telling the outcome of NS2 deal is going to be, but what do these jaded people know, right.

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