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Comment by doublerabbit | Hacker News Reader

> there is no alternative to replacing fossil fuels. At some point the public will realize the lie of solar/wind as a replacement.

What lie exactly? Scotland had produced enough to power itself twice on Wind alone. [1]

How is nuclear a better alternative than Wind or Hydro when

- Nuclear is extremely dangerous with toxic waste needing special storage facilities. Criminal & Environmental contamination risks.

- Disaster if the plant is to be damaged - Chernobyl / Fukushima / Ukraine-Russia war

- You need an external power source to kick-start a nuclear station on top of requiring uninterruptible power supply - Fossil Fuels

- You need a large water source for cooling, extracting, processing - Limited Resource

Thorium reactors are a dream away, nice but not feasible as of the moment.

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/scotland-w...

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>What lie exactly? Scotland is producing enough to power Scotland twice itself on Wind alone.

No they aren't. This is at best misleading, at worst, a blatant lie.

What is happening is that on days with strong winds, they are overproducing wind energy but ONLY at certain times of the day. When they overproduce this energy, they cannot store it for later (because there is no battery technology today, or in the near-to-mid future that is able to store that amount of energy), and they cannot give it away, so they lose it.

This kind of headline is very very common. This is how the public is continually lied to and thinks that wind/solar is just around the corner. It isn't. It's never going to be.

>Nuclear is extremely dangerous with toxic waste needing special storage facilities. Destruction if the plant is to melt-down. (chernobyl)? You need an external power source to power a nuclear plant. Nuclear also requires uninterruptible power.

If you don't like nuclear ... fine, but there is nothing else. So now what?

>Thorium reactors are a dream away, nice but not feasible as of the moment.

Agreed. Also Fusion is a pipe-dream at this point in time. So now what?

Manufacturing, refining, and AI improvements are going to reduce the price of batteries by another 90%

> Manufacturing, refining, and AI improvements are going to reduce the price of batteries by another 90%

This is a pipe dream. Battery demand will be astronomical for decades to come. That means ramping up supply and prioritising deployment via price signals.

Your logic is backwards, it is the demand for batteries that will make them cheap. Just look at the actual data

https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline

> it is the demand for batteries that will make them cheap

This isn’t how supply and demand work. Demand can induce scale efficiencies in production, which lowers costs. That’s what’s happening in your link, which tracks through 2018.

In 2019, electric car sales shares rose globally and non-linearly [1]. We persist on that path. As a result, battery costs are spiking [2][3].

[1] https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/ad8fb04c-4f75-42fc-... page 15

[2] https://about.bnef.com/blog/battery-pack-prices-fall-to-an-a...

It is exactly how supply and demand works, lithium refiners are making huge profits, which causes more investment in refining capabilities which unlocks larger economies of scale.

If you don't understand this please just circle back to this thread in 5 years, and I can show you what actually happened.

How would things look if batteries were 90% cheaper?

Still too expensive by at least 10x.

No, batteries are already replacing peaker plants at TODAY'S costs

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/04/12/battery-storage-syste...

Replacing the most expensive form of power plant (and mind you, only the most expensive ones out of that class) at a quantity much lower than is needed to actually replace them, with serious supply constraints.

Batteries today are replacing peaker plants that run on things like refined gasoline, which are extremely expensive to run.

Battery + renewable is still not anywhere near cost competitive with base load plants, which is the honest comparison to make.

That is incorrect, "The International Energy Agency recently predicted that solar power would become “the cheapest source of electricity in history,” and a report by Carbon Tracker found that 90 percent of the global population lives in places where new renewable power would be cheaper than new dirty power. " https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/10/26/magazine/clim...

Power demand is inelastic. What these agencies say about power prices is true if you don't factor in the fact that wind isn't always blowing and the sun isn't always shining. When wind and solar can produce power, they can produce it very cheaply. 1 watt of solar power is very expensive to produce from starlight, and so is 1 watt of wind power on a calm day.

The price of the batteries and/or overbuilt capacity has to be factored in to the price of renewable energy if you want to run the grid 100% on renewables. If you don't want batteries, and instead want a global grid, the cost of transport has to be factored in. Either proposition makes renewable energy extremely expensive for providing base load power, not to mention currently impossible.

Currently, we need something like 10-100 TWh of batteries for grid stabilization in just the US. Taking a high estimate of 1 TWh this year, that would be 10-100 years of the entire current global lithium ion battery production (not including the fact that those batteries are going to depreciate over 5-10 years). Pumped storage and other (weirder) energy storage methods also can't scale up enough to get anywhere near this demand.

Demand would be wildly higher so we'd probably have to mine the raw materials at 5+x the current rate, I expect.

> Nuclear is extremely dangerous with toxic waste needing special storage facilities.

I don't think this is true. Nuclear power plants generate relatively little waste and we know how to store it safely.

We may how to store it safely, but still doesn't stop it from being a risk. Only takes the contracted company get lax on the upkeep of the facility.

So stop contracting the work out. Have a government department handle it instead of just chucking it off to the lowest bidder

All the possible "extreme" dangers and disasters have end result comparable with 1 day of using coal at the scale humans are using it.

>- You need a large water source for cooling, extracting, processing - Limited Resource

Seas are going nowhere. Most NPPs are at the coast.

Salt-water is highly corrosive, you can't use salt-water to power the whole plant. You still need a pure water source.

> What lie exactly? Scotland had produced enough to power itself twice on Wind alone.

Doesn't say much for a variety of reasons:

- Even in Scotland, there's loads of days where there's "no wind" - on those days electricity has to be generated by gas or other means. So practically speaking as wind cannot be guaranteed it is impossible for Scotland to not generate carbon, via wind alone.

- As usual for breathless wind articles, completely fails to account for heating - which in Scotland makes up the bulk of domestic energy consumption and most homes are heated by gas combi boilers.

- Also as usual, neglects transport - another huge proportion of energy consumption

- Scotland is a best case scenario - it is very windy relative to other countries. It doesn't have a huge population. And as part of the UK national grid it makes sense to build a lot of wind capacity within Scotland. But then looking at statistics for Scotland in isolation doesn't really make sense - it should be done at a UK national grid level rather than trying to gerrymander things.

Wind is fine for reducing gas consumption when it happens to be windy. But if you really want to tackle climate change, you need to tackle having a need for gas consumption at all, and wind won't do it.

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