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Comment by morsch | Hacker News Reader

Renewables are the only way that Europe will be somewhat independent in terms of energy in the forseeable future (though hardly emissions free). The technology is already there, we've just been sitting on our asses for two decades instead of pursuing it aggressively.

The number of installed wind turbines in Germany has stagnated, for example. Output has increased, but that's because of repowering old installations. NIMBY rules and incredibly complex approval procedures prevent growth.

You'd think this would be all the motivation required to rapidly expand renewables. Evidently not, we'll just keep having the same conversation. Whatever.

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Yes this is ridiculous. The Netherlands has been pretty good at expanding residential solar, but apparently the electric grid operators have been sitting on their asses for years, and so now we have too much solar because the grid can't handle the solar power during peak sunny days in summer.

It's like they plan nothing and just let things grow organically, which causes lots of issues and is inefficient.

The technology is not there for the grid to handle a whole bunch of excess solar energy during peak sunny days. We just don't have options for energy storage on the scale required. The usual approach of groups pushing for this is to handwave the problem away and call for more subsidies on domestic solar, which is of course popular with the public because it means money for them and punts the incredibly expensive and difficult part until later for someone else to deal with.

The technology is there, it's called demand response. Air conditioning and refrigeration are major workloads at the peak of summer, and can easily absorb any "excess" supply at a moment's notice. The heat capacity of whatever is being actively cooled then acts as your "battery".

Among many other things. We should have started figuring out this stuff -- and implementing it -- twenty years ago. Such a missed opportunity.

This isn't even about storage. This is just about having thick enough electric cables so that the grid doesn't overload. Right now the grid fails even if there are consumers for all that power. We're failing to transport the power.

Residential solar is very different to regular solar though. Grids weren't designed to aggregate lots of tiny feeds from people's houses, and it makes sense not to over-build that ahead of demand because in many cases the maths don't really work out except via subsidies, which can be here today, gone tomorrow.

All the easy sites for wind turbines have already been developed. Incremental wind turbine in new sites will be exponentially harder to get approved/accepted. If you don't see the development of wind turbins in the last two decades as a massive undertaking then doubling the install base will definitely be let alone tripling or more. This will be very inflationary especially because there is already a huge labor shortage for people servicing wind turbines.

I don't know about easy, but there are plenty of good sites left if you don't have a blanket ban of around a mile around every hamlet. And it'd help if the approval procedures for new construction wouldn't drag on for years and years.

These things aren't part of the physical environment, they're political realities. Are they fixable? I doubt it, like I said above, if people haven't got it by now, they never will. In the long run, Germany doesn't matter anyway, that's the good news.

> In the long run, Germany doesn't matter anyway, that's the good news.

I think this is VERY wrong if you believe in the severeness of (man made) climate change. It does indeed not matter as a share of emissions but if developed countries can not pull it off in a profitable way (or at least without loosing too much prosperity) the no other countries will follow (unless the WEF archieves to assemble their authoritarian super power to force everyone to comply)

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