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Comment by ncmncm | Hacker News Reader

The put-upon Romanian people will be saddled with super-expensive nukes.

For the rest of the decade, instead of building out low-cost renewables that get cheaper every year, they will pay for the nukes and for all the coal-fired power they are not displacing because they are just waiting for the nukes to get done.

In the end, they will get much less power for their money. More likely the project will be cancelled, uncompleted, as power is bought more cheaply from the European grid than it would cost to operate the nukes.

The Romanian people will get not a penny back after the cancellation.

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One point is that you can't replace an entire grid with renewables due to their intermittent nature. They're also building out renewables so perhaps the nuclear generators are intended to offset some of their reliance on coal/gas on-demand generators?

This is always said, but never true.

After you have built out enough renewables for day load and to charge storage, you build out storage. Not batteries, those are super expensive. Stuff that is super-cheap, instead. There are lots of choices. But you don't need to choose immediately. Prices are plummeting at different rates, and nobody knows which will be cheapest by then.

Can you cite what this super cheap storage is? My understanding is that li-on is the only existing option, however won't work at scale due to cost, longevity, etc.

I wouldn't call pumped-storage Hydro[1] super-cheap but it is the default and less expensive than trying to scale lithium. There are also cheaper battery chemistries than lithium when weight doesn't matter.

[1]: https://www.energy.gov/eere/water/pumped-storage-hydropower

Li-ion is the most expensive storage.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31485229

Energy storage, chemical methods aside, is freshman-level physics: pump against pressure, lift something heavy, draw down against buoyancy -- E = fx, E = mgh -- using processes already used at industrial scale in billions of cases. The only open question is what exact scheme will end up cheapest. But you don't need to know that to start building. You might switch over to building something cheaper, later, but anything already built still works.

(But NB: Energy Vault is the Theranos of storage. Steer clear!)

The Black Sea is deep, making underwater methods attractive. Romania also has high mountains, making conventional pumped hydro also practical. The reservoir for pumped hydro need not encompass a watershed, unlike regular hydro, so can be minimally disruptive, environmentally.

> but never true

Ehhhh, sorta? Wind power can be useful as a base load generator if you over provision by a large amount. But the problem is that during the summer months you will get ridiculously high generation and then in winter it drops like a rock. What's worse is that solar follows this same trend.

Typically pricing per kwh is averaging across the year. But during the winter you will have terrible shortfalls. So you need to double or even triple that price because you will have to double or triple the wind turbines and solar panels to achieve the same stable load.

Unfortunately, power storage for months worth of power is even more expensive than just over provisioning. Batteries are great for grid stability, but not for long term energy storage.

You can get a good idea of what renewables look like over the year here: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=16851

So unless we want to keep running natural gas in the winter, or we want to pay 3x as much for renewables, geothermal and nuclear would make a lot of sense when paired with renewables.

You build out a few days or weeks of storage, and also transmission lines. Where it looks like your storage is going to run dry, you order a shipment of ammonia to burn, synthesized at any solar farm in the tropics, or a wind farm anywhere.

The appealing quality of synthetic fuel like ammonia is that there is always an eager market for as much as you can produce, so once your local tankage is full, excess power produces reliable revenue. Your synthesizers are idle only when you are drawing down banked energy, and not necessarily even then if you have plenty.

Synthetic fuels produced from atmospheric carbon and cheap solar energy make sense. I'm cautiously optimistic about Prometheus Fuels.

https://prometheusfuels.com/

Synthetic hydrocarbons will always cost more than synthetic ammonia and synthetic hydrogen. Of the two, ammonia is more practical to transport.

Synthetic hydrocarbons will be used for a long time where those others can't be made to work, such as old cars and chainsaws, and air transport until LH2 fleets and infrastructure are built out; or are used too rarely to merit upgrading, like back-up generators.

I guess we'll see which ones pan out. I'm hoping for both as long as we stop dumping carbon into the atmosphere. Although I'm not so sure about the cost. Prometheus is looking at pretty inexpensive prices per gallon.

They are only one of many. Each has an angle.

It is hard to know which are like Energy Vault, just there to scam investors, and which are onto something. I bet Terraform Industries is, at least, on the level. Whether they have the sauce to compete is a whole other question, but it will be a seller's market for a long time. That means whoever does it cheapest gets most profit.

Probably whoever manufactures equipment cheapest wins, even if their thing is not the cheapest/most efficient to use.

We Romanians will wait to see energy at German prices and pay billions upon billions to buy batteries to store the energy. And btw wind, is really damaging to the birds in the area

The bird thing may be not very significant.

Like the green hydroelectric power is killing all the fish and destroying the rivers? Still happens almost everywhere. Priorities.

There are better choices.

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