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Comment by nicoburns | Hacker News Reader

If we’d built out renewables more aggressively in the last decade we’d be a lot less reliant on fossil fuels, and energy costs would be a lot lower.

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The two data points that determine the market price in nord pool right now is the gas price and transmission costs. The revenue that renewable power plant owners get is determined through those mechanism rather than by what production cost those renewable plant owner has. As the economist here has reported in the news, more renewable energy doesn't translate to lower prices at this point in time.

EU are considering capping the price roof in order to address this so that energy prices start to match that of production costs. The European grid also need overproduction if we are to have market forces driving down prices, and you need large and effective transmission lines in order to distribute the renewable energy without bottlenecks. We also need to have reduction in energy usage when renewable energy production is low, and we need to reduce the dependency on the quite aged hydro power installations in the northern parts of Europe. The water reserves at those hydroelectric stations is also in a historically low levels, likely caused by a combination of climate change and poor management.

We need more of everything if we are to disconnect the Russian gas from European energy market.

We physically can't build enough windmills to replace fossil fuels. They'd take up too much space.

I'm all for having renewables when the technology is ready, but it's not and high energy prices will start killing old people that can't afford to heat their homes.

What gives you that idea? Of course we can build enough windmills and other renewables.

That doesn't even pass the napkin math test. "An average onshore wind turbine with a capacity of 2.5–3 MW can produce more than 6 million kWh in a year" (https://www.ewea.org/wind-energy-basics/faq/) "Estonia is the total consumption of 8.80 billion kWh of electric energy per year". (https://www.worlddata.info/europe/estonia/energy-consumption...)

Are you saying there's no space in Estonia for ~1466 wind turbines? That's before we include offshore wind, solar, geothermal, nuclear, hydro, and storage... Basically, you're spreading FUD.

I was more thinking of more populated countries like the UK, but it's still a large part of the countryside.

>> That's before we include offshore wind, solar, geothermal, nuclear, hydro, and storage... Basically, you're spreading FUD.

Yeah, one of those is not like the other. Not sure how you slip nuclear in there given that Greens are against it. Storage isn't a solved problem either.

> I was more thinking of more populated countries like the UK

The UK is solving that problem by putting most of the turbines in the sea. Seems to be working well so far.

Clearly not as energy prices have gone up due to a shortage of supply.

The amount of supply depends on amount of wind turbines built, not the amount we have space for. We have space for a lot more than we've built so far.

They may be against it. They also have a very minor representation in the uk gov, so not that relevant. Storage is practically non-issue. We can dump the waste underground for thousands of years with almost no planning. (still a more healthy solution than what we do with other fuel now) The volume required is basically not worth talking about.

For storage I was talking about holding electricity generated by renewables, not parking nuclear waste.

Yep, and at the same time, the "greens" are against nuclear, the only thing that could actually replace fossil fuels and also works during windless nights.

No, they don't. Try doing the math. You'll end up at single digit percentages of land used. You can easily do agriculture around wind turbines, so land use really is not problem at all.

Maybe our economic systems have to be rethought? A tree is worth more dead than alive..... European economies have been accumulating wealth for centuries through colonization and exploitation of humans lifetimes... in the end what do you have? inflated real estate prices, overly mechanized agriculture producing basic junk foodstuffs, increasingly authoritarian political policies designed to restrict or bore people from contributing to civil society... this is leading to an existential crisis .... So many good films out there which capture the essence of the problem, that dreadlock guy who works? for Microsoft has a very good quote in "Social Dilemma" (1)

One suggestion would be politicians to be chosen by jury, for periods of say a year to lock them out of having so many fingers in lobbyists pies...

(1) https://files.fm/f/nm8vs6h5g

LOL

Of course, and im sure if the soviet union had just been more socialist we'd all be living in a workers paradise.

Where does the power come from on overcast and windless days?

Renewables definitely have their place, but they are nowhere near being able to replace the continuous production of FF and nuclear plants. Moreover, the grids were neither designed nor built to deliver power from massively distributed, massively variable sources.

There's a third problem too, which ecologically-minded people seem to overlook: renewables are only "renewable" if you consider the real estate they occupy to be infinite.

Again, there is an important place for these technologies, but it is not the case that we simply should have built more.

Tidal, geothermal, etc.

See issues 2 & 3.

Power comes a) from another place in the European grid where it's sunny or windy, and/or b) storage. a) works decently well today, b) has room for improvement, but demand for storage is low, since we don't have a lot of surplus energy that we could put into storage. Right now it's pretty much always easier to turn down the fossil fuel plants when renewables are generating a lot, so that's what we do.

Medium/long term we can solve this with storage and load shifting. For the time being it still comes from fossil fuels and nuclear as you say. But using renewables when sun and wind are available would still dramatically reduce are fossil fuel consumption, which would in turn dramatically reduce costs.

No objection here. It's not one or the other; it's both.

Agreed. We just need to manage the transition prudently to mininise impact to lives and economies.

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