Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomxor | Hacker News Reader

If anything, a single solar farm, or single wind farm is more resilient due to being more distributed. Individually damaged solar panels and wind turbines do not necessarily take all power production offline for that site.

Power lines are more likely to be a single point of failure, but that's the same for all power distribution.

View on HN

Have you ever experienced a CAT 4 or 5? There won't be much left standing. It looks like a nuclear blast. This is just wind damage. I've seen water move entire homes a mile with the height of water being as high as 30ft. It can take weeks to months to restore electrical power. To clean the mess up takes heavy machinery run by fossil fuels. And what if you want to start doing repairs to your property that may not be damaged that bad? You will need a gas generator. Solar will not cut it doing heavy power tool work hours on end...meh.

So your point is that the grid shouldn’t be powered by renewables because in a disaster you need to drive petrol powered vehicles and run a generator?

https://electrek.co/2023/03/14/cat-5-hurricane-proof-wind-tu...

Much of the time required to restore power after a major storm is grid repair. More distributed wind and solar farms would imply less need to fully-connect the grid to get people back online.

Electricity generated by coal also requires power lines.

This, children, is known as moving the goalposts.

The question of "what fuel do I want for power tools after a natural disaster" is entirely distinct from "what mix of sources should we use to power the grid?" Babelthuap is deliberately muddying the water here.

And, yeah, Babel, I live in Houston, and except for college have spent all of my 53 years within an hour or so drive of the gulf coast. I know about hurricanes, even big ones. That's a dumb objection to including renewable energy in a grid plan.

Because he's a paid astroturfed.

And that disaster recovery equipment runs on coal and/or methane?

> Solar will not cut it doing heavy power tool work hours on end

Of course it will.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com