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Comment by ricw | Hacker News Reader

Yada yada yada. Renewables are intermittent and cannot be trusted. We need nuclear. Sure, just that it's not even remotely price competitive despite decades of R&D and subsidies and nobody wants Nuclear in their back yard.

What they miss entirely is building an international electrical grid that can deal with intermittency of any energy source (even nuclear reactors go down for half years at a time). Why does Chile want to provide power to Asia, rather than the US (or in fact any of the countries along the pacific coastline)? Just as transportation infrastructure (containers, highways, trains etc) liberalised and reduced the cost of international trade, a grid would do the same to energy.

Great international electrical grids is what we really need. Then let the market solve for who, where and what supplies the power (with the right incentives of course)...

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> Sure, just that it's not even remotely price competitive despite decades of R&D and subsidies

There are rather clear signs [0] of political interference in the price of nuclear. It might be the only technology I've ever seen where the learning curve suddenly inverted.

The demand isn't even that we have to go nuclear at all costs, it is just ... if the global warming people are serious then a Fukushima every 40 years is nothing and we should be letting cheap nuclear (the safest, cleanest, most reliable form of energy we know of) take over. Instead it is being held to impossible safety standards and we're using coal (basically the least safe, most polluting form of energy we know about). This is madness.

Renewables are acceptable to me personally now the price has come down, but it is hard to overlook that places that go renewable all end up in the headlines for an energy crisis a few years later. Wind power is cheap but it isn't reliable.

[0] https://cama.crawford.anu.edu.au/sites/default/files/publica...

That's a weird paper.. no mention of Chernobyl, Three-Mile Island or any of the other major meltdowns or near catastrophes in the 1970s/1980s.

Perhaps the cheaper generation of nuclear plants were inherently unsafe, hence the more expensive costs going forward, necessitating a new learning curve as we "overbuilt" the plants to avoid thousand-square mile exclusion zones?

Even taking that on as a given (which, I mean, yeah pretty reasonable to tighten standards) ... that should be a step change as new standards are bought in, not a linear uptrend. Then the downwards sloping learning curve should resume.

As a former linear corridor permitting attorney who is married to a current linear corridor permitting attorney, I can tell you with confidence that there is no universe where we build any meaningful amount of new energy transmission in the PNW USA. We can't get a single powerline across the Cascades, much less the dozens we would need for this kind of grid resiliency. The current suite of environmental laws are an effective veto on significant new development through federal lands.

Could just avoid all of that by going underwater along the coast. But yes, good point in that power grid lines are as controversial and politically fraught as nuclear power...

>Could just avoid all of that by going underwater along the coast.

Not at a tractable price. Adding saltwater never makes things cheaper.

Kind of ironic, as running power lines seems as environmentally insignificant as they come.

The town of Paradise, CA would disagree with you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise,_California

California in recent years has been racking up a number of wildfires started by powerlines, both residential and interstate high tension lines. Granted, the PNW has a completely different ecological/rain story than California, but to say there's zero environmental impact (risk) is probably inaccurate

You also need to cut big grassy "highways" through otherwise undisturbed forest, and run roads through there, so that the trees can be trimmed back (ideally annually, but realistically every 3-5 years) it's pretty disruptive ingress of human culture into otherwise undisturbed wild forest.

I'm pro more infrastructure, but there's a lot to be considered here, you're introducing humans, effectively forever, to previously (and increasingly rare) untamed wild lands. Once that infrastructure is approved and built, it is almost never recalled

Last year one of the fires was blamed on a metal hook wearing through after 75 years in the field. It seems like doing a slightly better job at maintenance might be possible.

I know about the clearcut highways, they aren't very wide, and the underbrush grows on it. I don't see a big problem there.

> run roads

Is that really necessary to trim every 3-5 years? One could helicopter workers in every 3-5 years.

> wildfires

I suspect that can be mitigated by devising automatic systems that are faster at shutting off the power should there be a break or fluctuation.

Also, wildfires are inevitable regardless.

Most importantly, one has to weigh the (small) issues with power lines with the environmental cost of not doing them.

Climate change politics in a nutshell. At some point, some large group of people is going to have to do something they very much don't want to do, and guess what? They resist doing it.

Related video to this topic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gacGuWjqKco

The video profiles the EU's efforts to do exactly this. One example used is how Spain (geographically blessed with solar power), and Denmark (geographically blessed with wind), can both use France's nuclear power as a buffer between them to smooth out the peaks/throughs in their output, and therefore are able to invest in more renewable power.

Interconnected grids that straddle national borders are absolutely essential to increasing the amount of renewable energy we can build. The technical limitations are easy to overcome (especially for neighboring countries). The barriers are purely political, as this system requires a common electricity market on the grid, and co-operation between national governments.

Hopefully North America can get it's crap together on this. As it stands right now, the USA can't even get a common grid within it's own nation. Maine voters just rejected an interconnection from Hydro-Quebec. Which is disappointing since Quebec is blessed with near perfect geography for hydro-electric, and can no longer expand this energy production since it's capacity outstrips the demand.

> Maine voters just rejected an interconnection from Hydro-Quebec. Which is disappointing since Quebec is blessed with near perfect geography for hydro-electric, and can no longer expand this energy production since it's capacity outstrips the demand.

That's completely crazy. HQ's offer was something like 5 cents per KW/h. That's 3 times less than what New England is paying for right now with natural gas.

The lobbyists really did a great job here.

Based on everything I’ve read from actual Maine voters on that topic, they did so for good reasons. An interconnect with Hydro-Quebec can happen, if you find a way to bring Maine voters on board and that is a solvable problem. But if you treat their concerns as unimportant and you throw around words like “grand scheme of things”, then yeah, they will continue to reject Hydro-Quebec.

Part of politics is coalition building. If you can’t do it then you get what you get.

The message here is not "we need nuclear", but rather "we need clean reliable energy sources to complement wind/solar." If we can at least agree on what problem we're trying to solve, then we can rationally weigh the tradeoffs of nuclear against other expensive energy sources (like geothermal and carbon storage) that satisfy the requirement.

Building new transmission lines is quite difficult, especially in the USA.

Hydro is a cheap and clean energy source that complements wind and solar just fine. There is high variability in solar if your expecting 100% of solar power to be consumed, if you accept most solar power is going to be wasted because it’s still cheap at twice the price then things start to very very different.

2X = 4c/kWh solar + batteries + wind + hydro solves the grid just about everywhere. US might only get 6.6% of annual electricity from hydro, but it’s already a huge grid scale battery storing up extremely intermittent rain into dependable power. 6.6% 100% of the time is already an 80+% solution 5% of the time.

>Hydro is a clean energy source that complements wind and solar just fine

Hydro has some serious downsides for the ecosystem of whatever watershed it bottles up. Maybe newer implementations solve that?

The problem with hydro is that there are draughts. Is global warming going to make that better? Nuclear can run fine in rain or shine. Hydro should be put in the same category as wind and solar.

A a general rule, places where droughts are a problem don’t get enough precipitation to generate significant hydropower.

That said, when you start talking 0.01% edge cases plenty of options open up. Burning fossil fuels at that scale for example is nowhere near a significant CO2 source compared to current releases. I fully expect hospitals to have backup generators and that’s not a significant issue.

Droughts are supposed to get worse with global warming. If that is the case then places where they are not currently a problem could become a problem.

I have no issues using hydro, I just don't think it should be placed in the reliable category. I think coal, gas, nuclear, etc should be in that category.

That might be your gut feeling, but the utter simplicity of hydro made it vastly more reliable than those options you mention. Individual coal, gas, nuclear etc all needs to be regularly taken offline due to various issues from mechanical faults to weather and supply chain issues. As demonstrated by the multiple recent power outages in Texas coal, gas, and nuclear even have dependencies to the weather and the wider electric grid which will take them down at the same time.

Of course total capacity on an annual basis basis varies. But we care about the ability to reliably produce power when necessary far more than maximum capacity across months. Markets adjust to supply limits on an annual basis far more easily than a power outage.

Which are the sites in California where new hydro power plants can be feasibly installed?

We don’t need extra hydro, we need to reserve what’s already built as a monumental self filling battery.

Also, moving solar power from California to Washington state and hydro from Washington state to California is cheaper than building excess generating capacity in each state. It’s already part of the same transition grid, transmission capacity is simply insufficient right now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_power_transmiss...

Hydro currently produces ~7% of US electricity. Things like pumped hydro and conservation are just a smaller nice to have part of the picture, they're not the solution.

CA uses ~15GW of gas power when the sun turns off at 6pm. It still uses 8-10GW of gas during the day when the sun is shining. That gas is going to increase another 2GW when Diablo canyon is switched off. During the day while solar is running it additionally imports 4-6GW from the NW and SW interchanges. When the sun turns off at 6pm it jumps up to 8GW sometimes more of imported electricity.

Meanwhile during the afternoon and evening the NW region is generating 20GW with fossil gas and coal power. While only managing to generate 16GW at these same peaks with its hydro power.

There is not enough hydro to do this, and you can't build more. CA is a power hungry state that has outsourced much of its pollution to other states. This is a result of targeting renewables rather than targeting clean power. It needs to build firm clean power, whatever form that takes. Targets should be for CO2 emissions. Not for some favored technology.

You misunderstood, the day to day solution is batteries. Hydropower is for when your not getting enough sunlight in the day not when the sun goes down at night.

Currently, 5% of all solar power generated in California is wasted and that number keeps increasing because people just keep adding more solar. Storage is currently cost effective, and it’s only getting cheaper. More storage means building even more solar is again cost effective until eventually the grid ends up looking very different.

Not following how this would work. So overnight demand of the NW and CAL looks to be ~60GW. Assuming you can get 20GW of hydro between the two (which is a bit above current peaks) as your supplement.

So you'd need enough solar to on the cloudiest of days to both keep things running with daytime demand in NW and CAL while still providing enough excess to (picking some numbers) charge up ~30% of the batteries, while the hydro runs to supplement charging the other ~30% of charge, so that overnight the 60% of charge can be drained in conjunction with the 20GW of hydro continuing to run. Why even rely on hydro if solar can still do all this, just build even more solar.

Seems shaky and fragile. And this is before you even get to solving the rest of North America.

You need to expand the maximum capacity of hydroelectric generation not the average capacity which means zero new dams. As a sanity check if hydro can average 7% of US electricity 100% of the time that’s equivalent to 70% of US electricity 10% of the time.

To greatly simplify if daytime demand is 200GW and nighttime demand is 100GW. You build enough solar to in theory provide 600GW in optimal conditions and 60GW in the worst case accepting most of that is wasted. Still 90% of the time they provide 300+GW in the day which can charge batteries to provide 100GW at night. Which means 90% of days hydro is producing ~0 electricity.

The other 10% of the time solar is producing between 300GW and 60GW in the day. If it’s 299GW then hydro needs to supplement 1GW at night. If it’s only 60GW then hydro needs to supplement 140GW in the day and 100GW that night.

Now in the real world things aren’t that simple. Hydro isn’t a light switch, and wind is part of the equation etc, but as a first order approximation it works especially as you can use hydro to charge the same batteries that solar or wind would.

You say expand to 70% for 10% of the time. You mean you want to multiply several times over the number of generator halls, penstocks, turbines, generators, and water outflow from existing hydro schemes? There isn't the space for all that. And the cost would be astronomical. Plus the environmental impact of having several times the outflow from most dams at full power would be incredible. You could maybe at a stretch 1.5x it across the US on average. But most plans to expand hydro scheme output around the developed world get met with incredible resistance.

Increasing peak flow from dams is actually great for the environment as flooding is part of the natural ecosystem, this actually doesn’t go far enough to simulate natural variability.

Also, dams don’t operate anywhere close to 100% 24/7, what I am describing is generally closer to a 2x increase in maximum generating capacity than 10x which isn’t free but the value of electricity produced would be vastly high more than making up for these costs.

I don’t get objections like this: There isn't the space for all that. That’s not an inherent limitation, people built these dams in the first place, we can remove them and build a new structure if that’s what it takes. Don’t flood properties downstream is a perfectly reasonable limitation, don’t build any new infrastructure isn’t. 2019 we produced 100x as much solar power as in 2009, change happens.

Based on my research liquid air batteries seem to be the best complement to wind and solar. The cost is comparable to pumped hydro and has no geographic restrictions. You can solve the rest of the problem with enough interconnections across the grid.

In theory they might be a great solution, but it’s still very experimental. That said, the technology is currently much worse than generally described. Going from 25% to 50% AC to AC efficiency is straightforward, but getting 70% requires a “low grade” heat source in other words it’s not actually 70% efficient it’s converting a stream of thermal energy into electricity alongside the stated 50% efficiency.

New studies are showing that hydro is not as clean as we once thought and may be producing large amounts of methane (due to anaerobic breakdown of organic materials in flood basins), which is orders of magnitude worse than CO2 per unit volume for greenhouse effects in the short-to-medium term.

That’s missing the wider context, organic matter breaking down in rivers and estuaries also produces methane. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20390897/

Dams net climate change impact is very close to zero.

The fact that a problem already exists in nature does not justify further exacerbating the problem.

Their net climate change impact can only be considered close to zero when considered as offset fossil-fuel based sources. If they're emitting large amounts of methane and CO2 (until we get net 0 concrete), it seems extremely unlikely that the impact is close to 0.

They don’t make it worse because dams aren’t generating organic matter. Organic matter that falls into rivers is going to break down either way, and in a free flowing river it’s often going to break down where the water slows down in estuaries. Essentially you need to subtract the methane that would have been produced in other locations.

In terms of concrete, the percentage of concrete produced worldwide that ends up in dams is minuscule. Only 34 states even have any hydroelectric dams. The US alone is producing 90 million metric tons per year, look for the most recent large hydroelectric dam in the US it wasn’t produced in 2021, or 2020, or 2019, or …

As a matter of fact, the article repeatedly mentions the benefits of nuclear power.

There was a North Africa project to power Europe using this approach called Desertec. Here's a fairly negative review of what happened. https://www.ecomena.org/desertec/

One issue is that they tried to set up an export system for solar electricity before they ensured that the local economies would have priority access to reliable power, that may have been a central problem.

Unfortunately many leftists are more interested in manipulating green energy to meet their unrelated political goals than solving global warming. If a green power project does not also bring about an international dictatorship of the proletariat to free the world from corporate oppression, they are happy to block it. They never mention that their obstructionism is an affirmative vote in favor of our current unsustainable practices.

In this case, the article's author is worried that Desertec, while much cleaner, and a clear environmental win, could replicate some of the political dynamics of oil extraction in the middle east.

He pretends that he would like to see "decentralized small-scale projects that can be democratically managed and controlled by local communities that promote energy autonomy". But has this been created? No. By opposing actual real projects, he is voting to keep extracting and burning oil. With this article, he is actively promoting oil and the dictatorships propped up by it, while pretending to fight against injustice.

So we just have to be ok creating new systems that reproduce the extractive, abusive relationships between Europe and Africa that existed in the past (and continue to exist today)?

Build a conveyor belt that literally transmits the solar resources of African countries to Europe that does not guarantee that Africans actually benefit from the transaction?

The climate crisis should not be used as an excuse for rich countries to plunder underdeveloped ones.

Sunlight is renewable, and will not run out

Yes, it's a pretty common phenomenon. Placing ideology before practical results doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Just build the system, please.

There is however a way for an industrialized nation to partner with a developing country for such projects in a mutually beneficial manner, rather than using the strict old-school colonial plantation model.

For example, I note that Saudi Arabia's role in the global oil market - which was due to the USA's investment in Saudi Arabia - has done far more to drive local development than the French 'partnership' with Niger's uranium mines has done to drive the development of that country. Niger supplies about a third of France's uranium, but get basically nothing in return:

> "According to the World Bank, around 60 percent of Nigeriens live below the national poverty line. With a per capita income of $420, Niger is one of the world’s poorest nations. In 2016, it ranked 187 out of 188 countries on the United Nations Human Development Index."

I get the sense that China is offering better deals to African nations than Europe or the USA is, but that's very iffy too.

> For example, I note that Saudi Arabia's role in the global oil market - which was due to the USA's investment in Saudi Arabia - has done far more to drive local development than the French 'partnership' with Niger's uranium mines has done to drive the development of that country. Niger supplies about a third of France's uranium, but get basically nothing in return:

Every country in the world needs oil. You can buy refined oil products at every corner store of the planet. SA's oil is also easy to extract, so it's a rather low tech operation.

It's not the case with uranium. There are very few buyers and the tech required to mine and handle it as well as to use it isn't widespread. Without France buying and funding the mine it it's questionable whether there would be a mine at all.

For a solar farm, every country with a coastline and useable land will be offered a chance to bid and the lowest bidder will get the contract.

Can the electricity be efficiently transmitted that far though? If so, this idea is incredible, the sun is always shining somewhere on Earth.

No, there is massive loss from transmission as a function of distance

High-voltage direct current connections have a loss in the order of 3.5%/1000km (that's approximately 10% loss per 3000km). China is operating several power lines at even higher voltages because that makes it more efficient. The loss for direct current depends on the square of the current, so you really want to reduce the current (which transmitting the same power at a higher voltage does).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current#Ad...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-voltage_electricity...

Yes it can. It's a good idea but the main downside is it ignores self-defense risk.

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