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Comment by clairity | Hacker News Reader

storage (and grid stability in general) is always the crucial achilles heel to renewables and it's always handwaved away with fantastical arguments positioned squarely against nuclear (here, springing up a whole global hydrogen economy out of nowhere). it's frustrating to see so much needless internecine fighting when nuclear plus renewables is the most viable answer we have right now to a fossil fuel free future. we need to be laser-focused on removing coal from our energy present, let alone our energy future.

coal is still nearly 30% of the electricity generation in the US (and 11% of total energy consumption). if we'd just kept building nuclear like we had between the 70s-90s, we'd be coal-free right now (other than that the bit used by industry, which is about 10% of the total coal use, and 1% of total energy consumption).

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The phrase "Achilles Heel" implies it's a fatal, unsolvable problem. But the cost of dealing with intermittency of renewables is looking like it's not bad, especially if one takes into account all the ways it could be dealt with (like thermal/cold storage out at the edge of the grid.)

“could” being the operative word. so much could happen, but what’s currently realistic is more sobering. currently, we have no way of realistically storing the magnitude of grid-stabilizing power required by intermittent renewables. even all the car batteries in the world are not anywhere close to enough, and that’s after 2+ decades of mining and manufacturing. pumped hydro is similarly limited. molten salt storage? decades. kinetics? decades.

but no one is saying we stop renewables. what we need to be saying is that we resume nuclear (primarily a mediopolitical problem) and do away with coal as fast as possible while we sort the storage issue out over the coming decades.

Factories to make storage media are under construction today, as we speak.

Do you imagine they will not be operated? Or, that what they build has not already been shown to work before they got investment to build?

We don't have much storage because we have not built storage yet. After we build it, we will have it. Is this hard to understand?

At the moment, spending on storage would be foolish, because there is nothing to charge it from. But we will need those factories ready to operate when we do begin to need storage.

At some point caution becomes excessive and obstructive, dismissing a possibility you don't like until after it's been rolled out and solved the problem. A reasonable assessment should look at the technologies and judge how likely they are to work.

All the technologies are now subject to ever-increasing economic incentive to make them work. There are trillions of dollars riding on this. The world could spend a quadrillion dollars on energy over the next century. It doesn't get much bigger than that.

If there is anything retarding any of these technologies, it's competition from others. In the end, you'll see most of them failing to come out on top. But that will just be a sign there were better options, not a sign that these failures couldn't have also done the job.

Molten salt storage, btw, isn't IMO terribly reasonable; there are much cheaper media in which to store heat, like sand.

Not to mention, most of the big problems facing us now can be reduced to an energy problem, given low enough energy costs. From desalination, to carbon sequestration, to cement, to production of hydrogen and carbon-neutral liquid fuels, to ammonia production, to even peak phosphorus, at some kWh price point all of these just become "throw electricity at it". Excess energy can always be used (in theory). Renewables plus storage still means cost per kWh increase at certain times or conditions.

We need every fossil fuel plant around the world offline yesterday, and every coal plant offline 50 years ago. The anti-nuclear sentiment really is a shame.

Building nukes would bring climate catastrophe nearer.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-california-ke... we are already getting gigawatts from batteries.

And what do you make of the argument that nuclear takes too long to ramp up construction? I mean Biden’s infra legislation does include support for nuclear and California just decided to keep open its last plant, but the solar/batteries combo is so cheap, easy, safe and decentralized (which a lot of the California libertarians like) that nuclear can’t compete really.

Right, all the existing nukes will be mothballed as unable to pay for their own operations, except where tax- or ratepayers are forced to subsidize it.

Then, the actual cost of every kWh they ever delivered will jump up as the enormous capital cost is suddenly amortized over many fewer kWh.

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